In the final month of my graduating term, I find my thoughts turn frequently to what comes next. There are graduate school paths that are compelling, as well as career opportunities that have already opened to me through my undergraduate degree. This is a great problem to have, and I am privileged to find myself in a situation that would normally present a win either way. However, a complication I wouldn’t have thought to anticipate before I started my academic journey has arisen, namely, what it means to be a taxpayer in the U.S. today.
Not that the situation was problem free before, but who could argue that a U.S. tax dollar today funds wildly different things than it did just two years ago? Bloated defense contracts and the often shady deals that secure them were already a burden on the working class, and as our defense budget ballooned to multiple times the next ten countries’ combined, we also had to endure attacks from special interests on our dwindling social programs. Health care and higher education, we have been told, are too expensive to make publicly available, yet no such objection is ever raised to the billions seemingly tossed with ease at wars in which we often gain nothing or even suffer great losses.
Clearly, we already had a problem, but what can we make of the situation that is before us now, where instead of overspending on counterproductive wars, we are now overspending on counterproductive wars that are also illegal and instigated at an unstable president’s whim.
The social contract between the taxpayer and the government was not supposed to work this way. Ideally, a tax dollar spent should represent our common values as people, a mutual statement of our priorities. The Trump administration, however, has taken an authoritarian posture with our public money and has made increasingly illegal moves to subvert Congress, and thereby the people, in having a say over how our collective wealth is spent. With the most recent military operation in Iran, the taxpayer has been lied to, given changing accounts for the rationale of and put on the financial hook for what can only be described as the baffling murder of Iranian school kids, resulting in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Incredibly, it doesn’t end with war crimes. The reorientation of our public spending from services for the public and foreign aid programs to the enrichment of AI firms, surveillance tech and crypto schemes has fully changed the virtue of participating in this economy. If the result of working hard to pay your taxes is that life gets worse for all but those who are already comfortable, is that a society or something more cannibalistic?
Given the political polarization of our current reality, this debate quickly gets clouded by charges of political partisanship or bias. I ask you then, what is politically partisan about objecting to our tax dollars being spent on a paramilitary force deployed to harass, beat and kill us as we go about our workdays? What do we gain as a country from the indefinite detainment in deplorable conditions of people who are accused of nothing but having the wrong accent or standing in the wrong place? What is politically partisan about the idea that the money we put into our nation as taxpayers should be spent to improve the lives of those taxpayers?
When I look at the reckless dismantling of USAID, the needless and unjustified clawback of appropriated funds for research programs, the brazen insider trading that calls itself a speculation market and the insistence by the Trump administration that the president should be able to drag us into expensive wars of choice with no justification, I see a reality where my tax dollar is toxic. Not just toxic to the world, but to myself as well. It makes me look in the mirror with a sense of collective identity, and see that as a U.S. taxpayer I am rendered ugly and callous by what that tax dollar buys.
I do not want to look in the mirror and see someone who has no choice but to enable the devastation of countless innocents. I do not want to see someone who shelters within their own convenience bubble, contributing little more than lamentations to a situation that has sped well past objectionable on its way to unacceptable. I don’t want to be this ugly.
From where I stand, I can propose little by way of a direct solution. Our media environment is fully entrenched in zero-sum politics, or the idea that a win for you is automatically a loss for me, as it is proving to drive online engagement and therefore revenue.
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Divided people are easy to rage-bait. So, as unmanageable as it may sound in the face of the moment, the only remedy I can point us to right now, today, is to finally organize a real general strike, instead of these pop-up protests and ignorable micro-strikes. A record-breaking protest on Saturday is a distant memory by Monday. One provocative internet post from the president later, and the protest is erased altogether.
Just as with COVID and the current “war” in Iran, the only message our current leadership will ever respond to is a financial one. Anything less can, as we have already seen, be quickly flushed through the news cycle and be rendered moot. Only when we, in numbers too large to ignore, refuse to feed a rabid beast that has escaped our control, will the rest of the world understand that greed is not the pinnacle value of U.S. culture.
Someday I want to realize the value of my Hamline education through contribution to our society, but that day cannot be soon or anytime while our tax dollar represents the very worst of what economic power can achieve. This is a hard moral line that I draw, which I hope you can agree transcends our political partisanship and describes our current moral decrepitude strata-wide.
A nationwide general strike that is well observed is the most obvious tool we have to effect this change, and a serious effort should be made to organize across political lines to capture the unified voice of the people, reaffirming our fundamental right to self government. We cannot continue to demote ourselves to asking permission to build the society we want. It is our wealth they pilfer, and ours to redirect towards whatever aims we find worthy.
