The Beer That Drank My Wallet

If we actually knew how much money the government steals from us, there'd be a rebellion.

Last night I went to my local watering hole, a stogy English bar where guys with six figure salaries stare into the bottom of their glasses and say "Oh, where did I go wrong, I wanted to be a..." Fill in the blank. Preacher, artist, writer... They wanted to be someone who makes less than they do now. They're sad that their dreams of being a starving artist were traded for the five zeroes in their salary and four hundred horses under the hood. It makes me sick.

Actually, it made me thirsty, so I ordered a round. That set me back $5, plus tip. Bad, but not too heinous.

How much money, in terms of "money I have to earn before taxes at my shitty day job," did I have to make to buy that bottle of beer?

6.2% FICA withholdings
1.45% Medicare
0.73% Federal income tax
5.3% State Income Tax
= 13.68% of my paycheck goes straight to the government
And...

$0.25 State Sales Tax (at 5.0%), since I ordered it with a meal
$0.09 State Beer Tax (built into the price)
$0.05 State Bottle Deposit (built into the price)

Figuring the relative buying power of what I make, I have to earn $5.93 to buy one round. Apply the term "earn" very, very loosely. Including the built-in taxes and deposits, the government makes $1.07 off every beer I order.

So what, eh? Small potatoes. But look close at the other taxes that shape our lives...

11.1% Fuel Tax (state)
9% Fuel Tax (federal)
50% Cigarette Tax (based on the $1.51 tax on an average $3 pack)
26% Property Tax
Don't forget these for your phone:

$6.38 Federal Subscriber Line Charge
$0.70 Federal Universal Service Fee
$0.13 Local Number Portability Charge
$0.42 911 State/County Charge
$1.75 State/Local Combined Tax

On top of all that, we have extra charges on our cable bills, room taxes on hotel rooms, tolls on our roads, parking meters in our cities, inheritance tax, vehicle title licenses, city vehicle stickers, oil and tire disposal fees, speeding tickets and parking tickets and jaywalking tickets and equipment compliance tickets and... Buy a piece of land in the middle of nowhere, don't do anything with it, and you'll owe the government sales tax on the initial sale and property taxes every single year thereafter. There are a thousand ways to lose your paycheck to the government.

Say you make $120 for a few hours of digging a ditch, by hand, in Mississippi in August. That's back breaking, sweat-drenched work. You've earned every penny. How much gets stolen? Say you buy a tank of gas to get to the job ($32), smoke a pack of cigarettes ($3), drink $5 worth of beer, pay your phone bill ($50), and buy $30 worth of food between breakfast, lunch and dinner. Those are solid uses for your money. The government gets $33.43 from you, which is 27.9% of what you made. If you work at $15 an hour, that's two hours sweating in the sun you do just to satisfy the public coffers.

What do you get for that 27.9%? You get to pay Halliburton to steal money when your drinking buddies get sent off to Iraq without proper body armor. You get to fund a war on drugs that is intentionally mismanaged so that it continues, by design, to distract the public conscious and maintain thousands of jobs...and that drives local drug prices up. You get the honor of supporting a welfare mom's crack habits while inner city schools don't get the books they desperately need. You get to buy genocidal foreign dictators lunch in the opulent White House when they come to chat with our president.

And you have no choice. You have to pay, or the IRS will take everything you own. Homeless, you'll wander the streets until you get arrested for vagrancy and thrown in jail, where finally you'll get to use your former money when you get fed fifty cents worth of shit that the private prison company charges the taxpayers ten dollars a unit for.

Ain't America grand?

Our forefathers did a little somethin' somethin' about the taxes they hated: they boarded a British merchant ship and dumped its cargo into the harbor. We called it the Boston Tea Party. They called it liberation. When is enough, enough?