Americans Now Spend More on Taxes Than Food and Clothing—Combined

A troubling new report released this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Americans spent more on taxes last year than they did on food and clothing—combined. As the report shows, this problem shows no signs of slowing as the average American's rate of taxation is increasing at a staggering rate.

As CNS News reports, in 2016, according to BLS, “consumer units” (which include families, financially independent individuals, and people living in a single household who share expenses) spent more on average on federal, state and local taxes ($10,489) than they did on food ($7,203) and clothing ($1,803) combined ($9,006).

Instead of realizing they are taxing Americans, quite literally out of their clothes, the state has been increasing the rate every year.

The average tax bill for American “consumer units” increased from $7,423 in 2013 to $10,489 in 2016, according to data released this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That is an increase of 41.13 percent—in only three years.

According to CNS:

The survey publishes the itemized expenditures of what it refers to as “consumer units,” which include “all members of a particular household who are related by blood, marriage, adoption, or other legal arrangements,” or “a person living alone or sharing a household with others or living as a roomer in a private home or lodging house or in a permanent living quarters in a hotel or motel, but who is financially independent,” or “two or more persons living together who use their income to make joint expenditure decisions.” The BLS said that a consumer unit generally refers to a family.

Below is the data from the BLS report, notice the increase over the last 3 years.

In the land of the free, if you wish to remain relatively free, you must give the state a percentage of your income. If you do not give the state this income, they will continue to escalate pressure and eventually move to force. You will be subject to kidnapping, caging, or worse. This legalized extortion is sold to the American public as taxation.

Taxes, we are told, allow the government the ability to provide services for the citizens. Roads, schools, parks, etc., we are told, would not exist without all Americans being forced to hand over a portion of their wages they earn through their labor.

If you complain about taxation, the average American will answer back with the programmed response, somewhere along the lines of, "if you don't like it, you can move to Somalia." Sadly, however, this response does nothing to address the ever-increasing burden placed on the American people through taxation.

Most defenders of the state assume that government services provided through taxation help the poor too. And, sometimes, some poor people do benefit financially from government programs. But there’s a hidden cost: taxation and mandatory programs (Social Security, for instance) that hurt the needy by restricting their choices. Government taxes away income that low-income households could invest in improving their lives. At the same time, state-sponsored benefits create incentives that keep the poor trapped in poverty.

This never ending cycle of taxation and earning is compounded every year as rates increase and, as seen above, the government's own data shows this.

While it is easy to sit back and thank the almighty state for roads and schools—which are in horrible condition—many Americans are entirely unaware of where most of their tax dollars actually end up.

For example, as of last year, in Afghanistan only, the number of failed projects, meaning only the ones that were unsuccessful, cost taxpayers over 100 billion. To put this number in perspective, the entire amount of money the United States allocates to spend on rebuilding America's crumbling highways every year is less than half of that.

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/899627928102850561

But what about education. Compared to what America spends on maintaining the hundreds of military bases throughout the world, dropping bombs in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, etc., education spending is a drop in the bucket.

[caption id="attachment_77079" align="alignnone" width="696"] Courtesy of ATTN:[/caption]

The near $600 billion dollar bill Americans are hit with every year to keep the empire great is only the publicly admitted amount. As TFTP has reported in the past, the Pentagon often "loses" trillions of dollars in war spending.

It is also estimated that America has spent over $1 trillion in tax dollars kidnapping, caging, and killing people for possessing arbitrary substances deemed illegal by the state. Through the war on drugs, the government has squandered a trillion dollars of your tax dollars and the only thing we have to show for it is an opioid epidemic and the world's largest prison population.

As Americans continue to be raked across the coals to fund the empire and the police state, it is also important to note that the tax rate increases every year because these tax addicts are spending way more money than they can possibly steal from the citizens.

In fact, a massive chunk of your tax dollars (hundreds of billions of dollars) goes to paying interest on the exponentially increasing national debt held by the Federal Reserve.

Once we take all these factors into consideration, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that total government bankruptcy is a mathematical certainty—even if they took 100% of what you make.

As the years go by, the tax rate continues its upward trend, and America begins paying more in taxes than they make, remember that only a portion of this money goes to actual things that benefit you directly. In fact, as stated above, in the land of the free, your tax dollars are used more to decrease your freedom than anything else.

The greatest threat facing America today is the disastrous fiscal policies of our own government, marked by shameless deficit spending and Federal Reserve currency devaluation. It is this one-two punch - Congress spending more than it can tax or borrow, and the Fed printing money to make up the difference - that threatens to impoverish us by further destroying the value of our dollars.

-Ron Paul