Where Does All the Money Go?

Sometimes Golem wonders about this situation. There isn't any money to pay for education. There isn't any money to pay for health insurance. The bridges and that type of infrastructure are falling down. We know where the money comes from. We have a federal tax on our income. We have a state tax on our income. We have a tax on almost everything we buy. That's three. Property tax and probably a whole list of others, too. But they tell us we have no P.E. in schools and people are getting fat. They tell us they need another tax to fix the roads and stuff like that. But they don't tell us where all the money goes. I remember in high school when all of a sudden they came up with a 3% sales tax in California, they said ah... don't worry about it, it's only 3%. By the time I left it was 6%. When I bought stuff in the stores in Japan it was bliss to pay the price on the sticker. You knew exactly how much stuff cost. I remember ten years later when the government of Japan told its citizens not to worry about the new implementation of a 3% sales tax. Suddenly, the abacus became a rare thing in shops. They started pasting little charts next to the cash register and the calculator became fashionable. And I lost a little pleasure that all of us used to have in America; paying the price of the product. And I thought to myself that the last time I heard, the sales tax in California was fifteen percent and well, welcome Japan to that. So, where does all the money go? Maybe McCain and Cheney have some idea and the congress and the senate and the people in Washington making up little rules to make us better people. I mean now they have done research and figured out that until the age of four, children should face the back in their obligatory car seats. Maybe we should all drive backwards. Of course, the longer they can keep a citizen in the dark, looking at the fascinating scenery of upholstery patterns, the longer they can soak us with taxes. I think I'll look out the window. I prefer to have a point of view. And I wasn't driving in the sixties, but hey, I saw the cows along the road, wern't all the roads pretty sharp then, and the funny thing is that I guess they must have used tax dollars to provide an actual service and maintain them. Of course, we didn't have a sales tax then. Where did all the money come from?