Last April, the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought declared the U.S. Government should not provide any money to American citizens for day care, because the United States “can’t take care of day care.
We are a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people.” But then he got to the main reason he didn’t want the government helping its people on such basic needs: “We’re fighting wars.”
Politicians claim there’s no money for healthcare, infrastructure such as roads, bridges, airports, hospital, cost-of-living increases, but they will sure find cash for what is most important to them: fighting endless wars.
Yet, politicians run their campaigns promising these very things to prioritize the regular voting public. This is a quote from President Trump in February 2018: “We will build gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways, and waterways all across our land. And we will do it with American heart, and American hands, and American grit.”
That all quickly changed once he took office. What happened to that promise? How are we now being labeled as “communists” for asking what was already promised to us? Was Trump also a communist for offering?
Does this not bother you, because it certainly does to me. What are they doing with our hard earned taxes? Paying for wars at the expense of taking care of its people.
I have had the privilege of traveling with my husband to several parts of Europe and I’m in Istanbul Turkey as I’m typing this where their airports and food look like five star hotel facilities, and the quality of their infrastructure and health of their food is meaningfully superior to the average counterparts found in the United States.
How is it that countries like Turkey, Portugal, Germany, France, or England can routinely provide such quality to their populations but we - allegedly the most powerful nation in the world- cannot?
I don’t know about you but I’m sick of our politicians and elite lies. They lie about everything. Our food is being recalled by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) daily now. I’m sick of my paycheck being squeezed to fund foreign countries and their wars.
When I go to work, I am not putting forth considerable effort so another foreign country can take money I earned and commit sometimes heinous wartime acts with it. And when you go vote, there’s always that ONE question, “would you like XYZ state to increase state taxes to continue to maintain the roads? NO! My answer is no!
How did we get here, friends?
America was the leader in technology - we even put a man on the moon. People from all over the world looked up to us with admiration. How were we left behind and why aren’t we mad enough about what our own government is doing to exploit our wages to the benefit of other lands at our expense?
We don’t get adequate value out of our taxes. And you know what the sad part is? Somehow, the elites have managed to convince the very people who need these basics the most - especially working-class and lower-income Americans -that asking for affordable healthcare, decent infrastructure, fair wages, and basic public services makes them communists, liberals, or socialists.
Since when did expecting our own tax dollars to provide the basic foundations of a functioning society become a radical idea?
Ask yourself, are we getting nice roads or affordable housing? Are your medical bills covered? How many people have died because they could not afford cancer treatments or insulin. Can future generations afford college?
We work hard and pay taxes. We vote and send people to Washington with the expectation that they will represent us.
So perhaps before accepting another empty promise or explanation about why America simply “can’t afford” daycare, housing or healthy food, we should start asking a different question:
If we can always find the money for defense and wars, then why can’t we find it for us?
