Taxes Down the Tubes

Commentary

While filing my 2024 taxes, I joked with my accountant that this might be the last year I was filing taxes. He just laughed.

This year, I skipped the joke and asked a question: “What would happen if I just quit paying taxes?”

He thought a moment, then said: “Probably not much. You’re really not much in their eyes. In fact, I know several people who never file and never pay.”

Before looking at why I asked that question, here’s a note of interest. In 2026, Americans spent about 7.1 billion hours working on their taxes. Individuals and businesses paying someone to help them comply spent between $464 billion and $536 billion.

You see what this means? We’re using our time and paying money to someone to help us put together forms so we can pay someone else more money.

Now the question: What’s my objection to paying income taxes?

Let me count the ways.

Money out the Window

First, for the past few years I’ve annually paid about 20 percent of my earned income in taxes to state and federal governments. This doesn’t include the taxes at the gas pump, the grocery store, the coffee shop, and for the apartment where I live, with part of my rent helping my landlords pay their taxes.

Writing freelance, I make a middle-range five-figure income. My Social Security benefits are in the bottom of the bucket. I have no dependents, no home to write off, and few deductible contributions to charitable causes. Most of the time, those causes are my nondeductible kids and grandchildren.

I knew 30 years ago that I’d never have the money to retire financially, and I was OK with that. I still am. What I didn’t know was that I’d be paying more in time and money in my old age to the government than an English medieval serf paid to his lord.

Each year I try to save money, and each year those savings go out to the government. It’s an exercise in futility. So, that’s one reason why I despise paying taxes.

But here are the real reasons I’d rather take the money I send out every year and give it all to charity or even burn it in the backyard.

The Looming Catastrophe No One Wants to Address

First up is our national debt. Twenty years ago, that debt was approximately $8 trillion. Today it’s closing in on $40 trillion. That’s about a 400 percent increase. If you want to see something terrifying, turn off that horror flick you’re watching and take a look at the National Debt Clock. By my count, it’s ticking ever upward at about $1 million every 30 seconds.

And the federal government just keeps blowing money like there’s no tomorrow. On the National Debt Clock, the money I send in is gone in less than a second.

Burning Through the Bucks

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) annually releases the Festivus Report, which looks at federal waste in the budget. In 2025, he and his assistants found “a total of $1.6 trillion in unnecessary federal spending, including $1.22 trillion in interest payments on the national debt.”

Here are just a few of the places your money—for those of you who pay income taxes—goes.

The Department of Health and Human Services gave $3.3 million to Northwestern University so it can hire 15 people, erect “scientific neighborhoods,” install “safe space ambassadors,” and form endless committees to “dismantle systemic racism.”

The department is spending $1.9 million on a “hybrid mobile phone family intervention” designed to reduce childhood obesity among Latino families in Los Angeles County.

The Department of State gave $244,252 to Stand for Peace in Islamabad to produce a television cartoon series that teaches kids in Pakistan how to fight climate change.

The National Institutes of Health spent $5.2 million to dose dogs with cocaine.

These and other agencies and nongovernmental organizations are the legal flimflammers. Now let’s look at the criminal grifters.

Fraudsters and Thieves

Ever since Nick Shirley broke the Somali daycare fraud story in December 2025, the online news and commentary sites I sometimes visit almost daily feature reports of swindles and rackets aimed at government agencies.

Here are three headlines from May 8 to May 9:

“Medicaid Scams in Texas: 15 ‘Hospices’ in One Building, Patients Signed Up Without Knowing”

“North Carolina Official: 47,000 Percent Rise in Medicaid Autism Therapy Billings ‘Begs an Audit’”

“Ex-NFL Player Gets More Than 16 Years in Prison in $197 Million Medicare Fraud Scheme”

In 2024, the Government Accountability Office estimated government losses to fraud as between $233 billion and $521 billion. That laughably large gap of $300 billion in the estimate unwittingly demonstrates the government’s problem. Is that really the most concise figure the Government Accountability Office crowd can serve up? No wonder we’re in trouble. Ah well, what’s another few billion dollars more or less?

Waste, criminal fraud, no cap on spending, no real attempt to budget and cut expenses: No one in his right mind would send a penny to any organization throwing away cash with such careless abandon, yet we do. Even then it’s never enough. As Paul’s 2025 Festivus Report states, “No matter how much taxpayer money Washington burns through, politicians can’t help but demand more.”

And that’s one final reason for my objections to the income tax.

That, and the fact that my teenage grandkids do a better job handling money.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.