Sickening Feeling

I spent the day at a conference today. One of the morning seminars was about using “underutilized” government land, within an Army program called “Enhanced Use Leasing“. It sounded like a pretty good win-win proposition: The Army gained income from non-tax sources, land that was otherwise wasted was used, and the tenant gets to use a secure location for a low cost. The speaker was some sort of real estate guy who specialized in working these deals. His paycheck actually came from the government, and he explained how the Army now operates as a business instead of a government entity. He was explaining how he could efficiently broker these deals and get all the layers of government and military approval and paperwork done as needed. He then said something that made me ill. It didn’t just disturb me, it made me ill, sick to my stomach, and dazed me.

He answered a question from the audience about the possibility of tax incentives in one of these lease agreements. His response was a firm “no, that is not possible”. He then expanded, laughing, “these senators and representatives do not like to hear talk of people not paying their taxes” (I’m paraphrasing) I could read his mind, I could see something that I’ve known all along and talked about before, but now I could clearly see something that was only a concept before. This little tax thing is no joking matter. It is their existence. Now I remember that roughly 40% of all the money I make goes to this government. I think of all the creative ways I’m taxed. I’m thinking about all the different ways I’m paying for this huge, bloated, fat, tick we call government.

Even though this program sounded like a win-win situation, I started to think about all the different mechanisms at work. The Army owns all this land, lots of land. The Army pays for this speaker fellow to fly around at these seminars. They pay him to broker deals, that bring in lease income for the Army. He spoke of all these approvals and buy-offs from military officials, senate committees, oversight groups, third-party consultants, etc. All of these layers of people, all getting paid through tax dollars. So the big government spends all this money (my money) for all this land and all these facilities, many layers of bureaucracy, red tape, committees, consultants, real estate deal makers, etc. These lease agreements provide income to the Army that can be used for special projects that don’t have to go through the normal channels…. but hell no, there will not be any tax deals going on! That would cause the whole program to crumble!

Government is a big business. It’s the biggest business. Now I’m thinking about the debt that our government has accumulated. If you divide all that debt by the number of taxpayers, you see that the average person’s personal portion of the government accumulated debt is $440,000.

There is that sickening feeling again. Used to, the biggest purchase you would make in your lifetime was your house. My house cost $146,000. I live in this house, I get to sleep here almost every night, I can deal with that debt. I can’t live with having to pay off $440,000 of debt that these pompous assholes decided to rack up on my behalf. How in the hell can I pay that off? 40% of my money already goes to the government in some form or another, and that debt is going up, not down.

It is time to put an end to this bullshit. I’ve had enough!