Pay Your Taxes – OR YOU’RE A TERRORIST!

As you might guess, this particular blog post is aimed loosely at the rich and powerful. You know, the very rich and powerful. Like... earn a billion dollars or more in their sleep type rich and powerful. The kind of people who never, not even ever, needed a single cent of their income because they already have way more than enough to live comfortably off of in their bank account(s).

You know. The true leeches of society.

Yeah, I'm a hippie commie ecofascist feminazi. Just firkin deal with it.

Anyway. If you're ludicrously rich and still reading this (I can dream) then pay attention, because I'm about to explain in laypeople's terms how the economy is supposed to work when you're not throwing a spanner in the works.

Society is not an individual. Nor is it a small group of your rich pals. It is a whole bunch of people, many of whom do the little things. You may sneer at the person who cleans your toilet, but if you actually got rid of her like your right-wing heroes want to, you'd have to either put up with a dirty toilet or -gasp- clean it yourself.

Society is whole bunches of people working together to create civilisation as we know it. This includes commerce, and lots of little things. Things like... municipal facilities. That is, things everyone can access.

Yes, dear rich person in your ivory tower, I am talking about the dreaded public services. Things like roads, communication, news, medicine... I can hear you shrieking about that last word. What could those hideous horrible poor people possibly do to deserve proper medical care?

Well, sunshine, those hideous horrible poor people do literally everything you don't want to. You call yourself a job creator, but you have no idea about the people who work for you. I bet you an Australian Dollaridoo that you haven't got a single idea how to launder your smalls.

If the world spared you and all your rich mates only, and eliminated everyone else tomorrow, then society would collapse. For real. Every single one of you would not know how to get food because your personal assistant was wiped out in the hypothetical Thanos-snap.

Your factories would stop earning because nobody would be there to run them, work in them, or supervise their security. Your driver would not be there, either, so you'd either have to drive yourself , or ride one of your thirty thoroughbred horses. By the way - nobody's left to muck out the stalls or feed them, so you'd better get on top of that.

If you have an accident whilst figuring out what the stick shift is for, then there'll be no hospital staff, no ambulance drivers, and no emergency services to help you out. Your private doctor might escape the snap, but the people who actually get the medicine and apply the bandages are gone. The nurses who do the care have vanished.

What's this got to do with taxes, you may ask? Well... medicine should not be privatised. Those poor people who you despise are all parts of a fully functioning society that keeps you in the level of comfort that you believe you deserve. As the saying goes, It takes ten men with their feet in the mud to keep one man with his head in the clouds.

Taxes pay for the roads upon which those poor people travel in order to get to the places where they work for you. They pay for public transport. They pay for the sanitation that prevents disease from running rife. Taxes even pay for socialised medicine. Poor people need adequate medicare and you can google any given study that would show you why.

However, if you're too busy or too lazy to look, I'll boil it down for you: Poor people are poor. They cannot afford private medicine, and they certainly can't afford six thousand dollars for a bottle of insulin. [That was hyperbole... probably]

It's not because they're as lazy as you think they are. It's how the little things all mount up. A human being needs about eight hours of sleep. A human being needs proper nutrition. A human being needs clean water. A human being needs safe shelter. None of these are easily available when you're poor.

When you're poor, you don't have a billionaire parent to give you a 'small loan'. Your parents are poor. Your immediate family is poor. Every single one of you is trying to scrape by as best as you can. You, rich person, have no idea what it's like to go through all the corners in your one couch just so you can afford to eat that evening.

Let's illustrate:

Low budget housing is very, very far from anywhere with work. This means that, though you can afford a safe enough shelter, more money is spent on transit. Public or private, there's not many ways to save money there. Transit eats time, too.

Many people work multiple jobs, so that eats more time. Getting between places takes time and it takes money. One job pays for the transit, another job pays for the rent... a third job pays for the food.

When you have that little time left, the food you get is the kind of food that's pre-prepared. Why? Because there is no time to prepare that food. All your time is spent either working or travelling to work or finally travelling home. So you grab something that's ready to eat and feed your family.

Again, that isn't that cheap. Neither is it nutritious or healthy. You might think legislation would fix that, but... all it does is put a further burden on the people who absolutely, positively, cannot afford that sort of expense.

It is shocking how expensive it is to be poor. You can't buy a house, you don't have that kind of money in the first place and likely never will. It's not poor life choices, it's living a life in poverty. There are very, very few opportunities to escape the hamster wheel of poverty.

However...

If you, rich person, paid your dang taxes, you could support literally everything that the entire Society needs and likely not even notice that you're missing any money. You could even support the latest socialist nightmare - universal basic income.

That one, unfortunately for you, is the key to escaping that aforementioned hamster wheel.

That one, unfortunately for you, removes the power from your greedy little hands.

It removes the miasma of fear for those who are down at the very bottom of the social ladder.

That's really why you hate paying taxes, isn't it?

...you terrorist.