Taxes In America

6 Pages 1606 Words

The subject of taxes in America has been a big pill to swallow for many Americans, especially the working class. It is true that many good things come out of certain taxes, but is that the whole story? Do all of our tax dollars go to the right things? Is our government even using our tax dollars for good purposes? I read a book over the summer by Bill O’Reilly, the famous TV correspondent who has his own television show called The O’Reilly Factor. In his book he discussed the heavy topic of America’s taxing system under the Clinton administration. Did you know that our government couldn’t compensate for forty-eight billion dollars? It does not know where it is, so they say, and the politicians will not show us, American citizens who pay the taxes, the record books on how they spend our tax money (O’Reilly 112). Do you, as an American taxpayer, have the right to know how your tax dollars are spent? The government sure doesn’t think so.
In the last years of the Clinton administration, 26,000 very special Americans received $8.5 million in food stamps. The reason that these Americans were special is that they were dead at the time the food stamps arrived. During that same period of time, the General Accounting Office estimates that more than $100 billion was erroneously sent to Medicare recipients (O’Reilly 110). Of course it is we the taxpayers who fund all
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this waste. As of January 2001, when President Bush took office, U.S. taxes were at their highest level since World War II, a time of grave national crisis and an unquestionable need for spending for national survival (Robertson 26). I don’t get it. Have you looked at your paycheck lately? Or have you just given up? Perhaps we’re just numb and don’t recognize that America is a functioning “tax culture.” Almost every action we take in our daily lives, from the necessities to the frivolous, activates a tax consequence. And it’s not just...