 I started writing this essay because of something someone said to me the other day at work. This person told me there's no need for rich people to pay more in taxes because they already pay enough and besides working people already don't pay any taxes at all. This guy is himself a part of the working class and makes like $15,000 a year and he was spouting some shitty dirt on Fox News but hadn't really bothered to think about and this happens all the time in our lives. Some smartass politician or media type will say something that sounds reasonable. It sounds like something that could easily be true. But if you spend 30 seconds thinking on it you quickly realize that they're full of shit. This guy at work didn't say working class people don't pay any income tax. He said they don't pay any taxes and that is just totally wrong. It's true that most working people and by working people I mean people who actually work. Not some asshole in a suit who needs to hire someone like me to change a fucking tire but yes. Most working people get income tax refunds or at least oh very little but the larger truth is that the poorer you are the more heavily taxed you are as a percentage of your income. Right off the bat very few people get refunds that exceed what they pay in payroll taxes. This guy who works for me pays like 8% of every dollar he makes in payroll taxes and will for the rest of his life. His electric bill has like 4 taxes on it. His water, cable and sewer are all taxed. His cell phone bill has hundreds of dollars a year broken up into 4 or 5 separate taxes. If he owns property he pays tax. If he rents he still pays property tax because his landlord includes that in the rent. When he drives first the feds and then his state tax the gas. Down here he ends up paying nearly 20% in tax on every gallon. If he drinks a beer to wind down from his shitty, tiring, underpaid manual labor job he pays tax on that. If he smokes he pays an assload of tax on that. If he's going to college or sending his kid he's paying taxes and fees. His fishing license is basically a tax. When he goes to a concert or a baseball game he's taxed there. There's a fee to get a driver's license that's a recurring tax just like the one on his registration and on and on and on. Just every activity, product or service a working person uses ends up having a tax or fee attached to it. Then there's the fact that if you live in the south you pay enormously high sales tax. There are two main effects from living in states with no income tax and low business tax. First, the wealthy can more easily be the vampires they are. And second is the average worker pays double to triple the sales tax people in the northern states pay. You're paying 8% sales tax so some fuckface can afford a third yacht. It really is that simple. And you know how that came to pass? Because that fuckface has your senator's cell phone number. And that same senator wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. Finally, because nearly everyone from the panhandler all the way up to the lower middle class spends every cent they make, the sales tax means we're paying up to another 9.5% on every single dollar we earn. Even after all of those other taxes and fees. The very wealthy spend a fraction of their income. In fact, the richer you are the less you can possibly spend as a percentage of your income. I spend it all. Bill Gates can only spend a fraction of a percent every year. Jeff Bezos and his vampire buddies can only own so many pairs of pants. They can only buy so many cars before it's pointless to buy another. The rest of their money sits and grows in tax free investments they're bought politicians created for them or fraudulent arbitrage schemes cooked up by the big banks or in PO boxes in the Caribbean or Delaware. My friend Larry, who's also a subscriber, recently asked me how I could justify a belief in universal health coverage as a libertarian. I don't recall what I texted back but the fact is I'm not a libertarian. I don't believe the government shouldn't be involved in the life of citizens. But I am a believer that the government is all up in the face of regular people but conveniently absent from the lives of the wealthy. No, I don't think a hairdresser needs a fucking license. No, I don't think it's the government's job to tell you who can legally fix a roof leak on your home. No, I shouldn't need to get a permit and an inspection to put up a fence or a shed. And no, I shouldn't get fined for painting my garage door the wrong color. No, the government shouldn't say what I can eat, drink, smoke, fuck, say, pray, or think. And no, the government shouldn't tax the life out of me for pointless, wasteful, comically ineffective programs that do nothing but layer bigger and bigger tax and regulatory burdens on regular Americans while criminalizing more and more of our lives. But I do think the government should be aimed squarely at the wealthy. I do think it's the government's job to maintain a fair society. I do think the government should regulate things that regular people can't address on their own. I can research which roofer is trusted. I can decide if I want to risk smoking pot. I can decide if I want a licensed hairdresser or an unlicensed one. I can't measure how much arsenic is in my water. I can't prevent the banks from imploding the world. I can't prevent corporations from selling tax evasion as an innovative financial product or using six-year-old Bangladeshi slaves to make themselves even wealthier while making my converse $1 cheaper. And incidentally far less durable. And here's where we get to why both parties are broken and wrong. The current Republican Party wants the government weak and ineffectual so that the wealthy can finish stealing every fucking thing that isn't nailed down. The Republican Party thinks the government shouldn't be taxing anyone except to fund the military. They think the government shouldn't worry about Monsanto poisoning my water because that's bad for business. They think the government should let the rich do what they want and hope that just enough trickles down to keep the pitchforks in the shed. But like the Democrats, they somehow think the government can and should be involved in shaping the culture. They want a small government but one that promotes Christian values. Strangely, they say the government has too much power in the economy while also thinking the government should be all up in my wife's uterus and that the police should be able to break down my fucking door because I want to take ecstasy or that some piss-hant fool in Mississippi should be able to make anal sex illegal. So Republicans want no government for the rich and only enough government to make sure nothing fun is legal for the poor. But sadly, Democrats have all the wrong solutions too. While a few of them realize it's kind of a problem that 15 minutes from now the wealthy will have so much power will need to sell our infants to them so they can make youth tonic from their bones, they don't really have any plans to deal with that. Most Democrats are just supporters of different rich people. Instead of being owned by oil, they're owned by tech, instead of tax breaks for wealthy Texans as tax breaks for wealthy New Yorkers. And even with the good Democrats, their solutions often end up making problems worse. Only someone who has never filed for food stamps can think expanding that program is good. Only someone who has never had to go through the nightmare of the unemployment office can think anything other than depression is coming out of there. Democrats want more programs, more government offices, more control over the lives of regular people. All while making sure insurance companies, or Kraft, or Exxon, or Goldman Sachs don't lose enough money to stop inviting them to parties and writing campaign donation checks. I sympathize with how difficult this balancing act is. Not to look like you're trying to solve problems while making sure you can still take millions of dollars from the cause of those problems. Democrats rightly recognize the realities of racism in the country, but have policies that will not help. Republicans and Democrats spend more and more time each cycle talking about the culture, racism, sexism, religion, values. These are all incredibly important things, but they're all also things that don't involve the government in any real way. The government cannot change the culture. It simply does not have that power. It wasn't the government that improved the lives of LGBT people. It was the culture changing because of savvy and continual activism, which led to a critical mass of people changing their minds while the stubborn older generation died. The current focus of culture war for Democrats is race in the police. Yet the solutions being offered are useless. You can't train the racism out of a cop. Anyone who has done a workplace diversity training knows how ineffectual they are. Likewise, policies that deliver benefits based on race can't help fix racism because they serve to entrench it. Black folks in America are overpoliced and lack money and power. Blue Ribbon Commissions will not fix it. Workplace diversity training will not fix it. New government programs laid on top of the ones we already have will not fix it. Those programs are themselves often racist because the people who work at them are sometimes racist. If black people lack money and power, the solution is to give them money and power. Take away the right for the police to stop cars based on suspicion. Decriminalize all drug possession. Pass laws making it easier to register and to vote. Pass laws giving all people higher wages, better healthcare, and easier franchise. What's good for the working class is good for the working class of all races and all genders and all sexual orientations. Democratic solutions are almost always expensive and stupid. Rube Goldberg machines that take a dollar in wages, run them through a million greasy rich hands and spit out 10 cents in government charity on the other side. All while increasing racial resentment amongst poor and working class whites who also need economic dignity, less aggressive police, and easier lives in general. The American Welfare and Health System is a system that treats the people who need it like garbage. Go try and get food stamps or Medicaid and tell me why we should think this system works or can ever work. Sit in front of a social worker with your baby in your arm as they scowl at you and berate you for not having six pieces of mail, three forms of ID, and pay stubs for the previous 26 weeks and tell me this is helping. The problem isn't that workers don't have food stamps. The problem is that workers need the government to buy them food because their employer doesn't pay them enough to fucking eat. The problem isn't that there's not enough money for Obamacare. The problem is a government supposedly of, by, and for the people has decided it's okay for a worker to get sick and die because that's more profitable for some fucking vampire than it would be to treat him and pay him like a human. When the economic solution is to create some complicated program, rather than just give people higher wages and direct cash payments, you have created a kind of condescension apparatus. It implies that working people are too stupid and irresponsible to know how to spend their money. Poor and working people are actually fucking economic geniuses. The fact they can live on $10 an hour shows how responsible they are. Republicans are right that democratic solutions are condescending. And Democrats are right that Republicans are basically heartless. But both of them are wrong about all of their solutions. These two parties are how we got here in the first place. My central political belief is as follows. Only as much government as needed and aimed where it's needed. Poor people need money and power, not government programs. So not that much government down here amongst the plebs. Rich people can't be trusted to go five minutes without cheating on their taxes, crashing the economy, poisoning the air and giving you diabetes because all the food is just corn and sugar. So yeah, a bunch of government up there. The government should work in the interest of the majority. The government should only do things an individual citizen cannot do himself. The government can advise me of the dangers of smoking meth with a prostitute, but it shouldn't be in the business of protecting me from me if I decide that I like smoking meth with prostitutes. Prostitutes and meth addicts are citizens too, by the way. The government should only be in the business of protecting me from the things I'm powerless to address. It shouldn't require hundreds of dollars so I can build my shed, but it should force the wealthy to pay workers enough to buy their own damn food. So yes, make sure Florida power and light isn't poisoning me any quicker than absolutely needed. Yes, make sure my shoes aren't made by a six-year-old Bangladeshi slave so that a rich person could buy another jet. Yes, tax me at a fair rate to pay for roads and schools and feds to harass the wealthy, but it shouldn't tax me at every point in my life and then turn around and pass law after law exempting the wealthy from paying taxes wherever they park their money next. liberty and dignity for the many, vigilance and constraints for the powerful. That's what I believe. I'll get back to games with a video about Dishonored and Saves Coming and video games next. Alright, thanks for coming, I'll see you next time, bye.