Suppose I saw you on the street and said, “Excuse me, but could you let me have a dollar to buy a loaf of bread?” And you said to yourself, oh, this is Jack, I’ll give him a buck. So you gave me the buck. But then suppose there was a tourist from Germany who was roaring drunk and belligerent and he asks me, “Hey man, I need another beer! Got a buck?” And then I gave him that dollar you just gave me and THEN I came back to you AGAIN and asked for ANOTHER dollar. Would you not say unto yourself, “This is ridiculous! I just gave Jack a buck and he gave it away! Now he asks for another dollar?! The nerve of this guy!” But then suppose while you’re thinking this, I reach into my pocket for something, pull it out, and a thousand bucks fall out of my pocket.

Far-fetched? Of course, it is. I haven’t got a thousand dollars or one dollar, for that matter. But where this is not far-fetched is with the United States government. This is precisely what they do with taxation. Now, our illustrious President Obama is giving billions of dollars of our tax money to terrorists in Syria. Oh, beg pardon, the “Syrian moderates”. They have not yet graduated from ISIS High School and took their U.S.-supplied weapons with them. If the government has money enough to just dole it out to the equivalent of Middle Eastern street gangs, then one thing becomes painfully apparent: We are ALL being taxed TOO MUCH.

Now I hear the Sandroids (The Bernie Sanders Mutual Admiration Society And Inflatable Raft Club) saying we need to tax the rich more. Why? Does ISIS need new anti-aircraft guns? Or is there some other covert aid to terrorist program elsewhere that’s launching the beta-test version of another murderous “democratic” movement? In retaliation, there are neocons that say, “The poor are not taxed enough!” To do what with the money? Buy iPads for teens in other countries so they’ll have access to American cultural junk food? No, we’re all taxed too much: Rich, poor, middle-class, working-class, opt-outers, denizens of remote deserts, and all of the general malaise-malignant masses of mega-mediocrity across America.

To what end are, they spending our money? I mean, what return-on-investment have we gotten? I mean besides terrorist attacks. Have these Syrian moderates paved our highways without filling in the potholes first, or pawed through our luggage at the airports, or done a no-knock raid on a raw milk dairy? Or denied the approval of new medications or refused to recognize medical marijuana? The Syrian moderates are not federal employees if they haven’t done all of those beneficial services the feds say our tax money goes towards. I think we’re getting ripped off by the feds here. And we can’t shop for a new government! We can’t even collate all our past tax paperwork together, use it as a receipt, and take our government back for a refund. “I’d like my money back. This government doesn’t get good mileage and it’s always in the shop. I’ve spent more repairing it than I’ve gotten to use it!”

The government has too much money. This much is obvious. I mean, they spend ten billion bucks like it was just buying a Three Musketeers bar because they saw it in the check-out line at the store and thought it sounded good. It’s time we did what the Mom Squad did back in the day before “self-esteem” became a cult that parents accepted en masse and allowed their brats to shriek at the top of their lungs in quiet restaurants. “He’s just expressing himself…”

But back in the day, remember this if you’re old enough, you’d go shopping with Mom because you had to. Get in the car, stop whining, or you’ll get something to whine about. And at the store, you’d see this nifty new breakfast cereal they advertised on a Saturday morning along with Scooby Doo and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. You know, “Tooth Rot Sugar Berries” and so on. So you started nagging Mom at the store: “Ooh! Mom! Mom! Can we please get Super Hyper Sugar High ADHD Crunch” for cereal?! Please? Please? Pleeeeze??!!” What’d she say? “NO!! You’re not eating that CRAP and I’m not buying it! You’re getting oatmeal. And you’ll like it—or else!”

Where is Mom now that we need her? The government is that bratty kid at the store, demanding this and that—and getting it! Haven’t we all seen this kid? We think, “Man if that was me, my mom would’ve smacked me into the canned peas!” But this is our government, people! They demand more money and we give it to them! And we’re not even getting some crappy breakfast cereal! Or government cheese!

When do we start saying NO? But how can we at this point? They conveniently deduct it from your paycheck before you even see it. Obama invented a new way to garner more cash via the penalty assessed on the tax returns of people who refuse government breakfast cereal and don’t buy Obamacare Crunch. And all of that money wasted. The other day I saw that nifty military aircraft called the Osprey fly over. Osprey?! It looks like a Puffin! That thing has been in the works of being made to work since the 1980s! It’s killed more U.S. military personnel than the combined air forces of the rest of the world since the 1980s. Well, except our own, that is. Our own air force is pretty good at fratricide. Look! Up in the sky! It’s an Osprey! No, it’s a Puffin! No, it’s a gargantuan waste of tax money.

It’s bad enough our government gives our money to foreign governments. But then they give it to people that aren’t even a government! It appears to me a smart guy could establish some bogus “Syrian moderate” group over there and bilk our stupid government out of a cool twenty billion dollars before they figured it out. IF—IF—the government ever figured it out. “The Official Syrian Moderate Army And Land Rover Racing Society” and the “Lawrence Of Arabia Memorial Freedom Fund” could be scamming the United States government out of billions while we’re sitting here counting dimes to see if we can afford a Dollar Menu taco.

So, no, we don’t need more taxes. We’re already paying too much. If people can’t see that, then they’ve been smoking the government cheese. My only question is: How’d you get that rolled up into the rolling paper?!”

The Best of Jack Perry

Jack Perry [send him mail] is an arrowmaker and writer who lives in the Four Corners area of the Southwestern United States. He has been a truck driver, a purchasing agent at a now-defunct renewable energy company (don't even ask him about the "Green energy" scam), and served in the 101st Airborne Division. He spends his time practicing traditional archery, making arrows in the wilds of the Arizona high desert, and finding himself only mildly amused by the antics of the Great Father in Washington.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/05/jack-perry/smoking-government-cheese/