It’s a fair question: is the money you earn yours, or does it intrinsically belong to the government? Governments everywhere have reached a cliff and are in full panic mode. Their need for your money to fund their budgets has reached the limits of conventional taxation. A shrew needs to consume one to three times its body weight each day; its hyperactive metabolism requires it to eat or die. That’s precisely why government entities everywhere have reached their crisis point. The shrew and government share the same instinct to devour everything in sight. What follows is the next iteration of government growth, its perceived need to discover and exploit ever‑greater sources of revenue, and what that means for you and me.
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Government appears to believe your money is their money!
Graphic: X Post
Blue states have already hit the ceiling of traditional taxation, and Red states are, in their own ways, expanding budgets far beyond any reasonable scale. The growth of government at every level resembles lava—slow, steady, and seemingly unstoppable. The numbers tell the story: in the 1800s, the total tax burden was 5–7% of GDP; by 1920, it had climbed to 10%; by the late 20th century, it reached 25–30%; and today, depending on where you live, it sits above 27–30%. Meanwhile, median income has not kept pace. The income tax, once sold to Americans as a levy on the rich, has inexorably expanded, except for the bottom half of Americans, especially through state and local taxes. The result is simple: government’s share of national wealth has grown exponentially, and officials, well aware of the trend, have turned their backs on the public in seeming disdain.
With the old revenue levers—income, sales, and property—now politically saturated, lawmakers and bureaucratic agencies are grasping for entirely new categories to tax. State revenue departments, city councils, federal regulators, and national policy groups all insist the tax base must “modernize.” That push now targets carbon output, digital transactions, streaming services, online data collection, congestion pricing, mileage‑based road fees, vacancy taxes, wealth taxes, and even proposals to tax unrealized gains. Cities are experimenting with taxes on delivery trucks, ride‑share miles, short‑term rentals, and payroll headcounts. States are exploring levies on financial transactions, luxury goods, and high‑value home equity. At the federal level, agencies are testing the boundaries of what counts as income, wealth, or economic activity. The goal is unmistakable: convert more and more ordinary behavior into taxable events. “Tax the Rich” is no longer a rallying cry; it’s the lie one utters as they steal an individuals productive worth to transfer to themselves.
To overcome objections, government agencies and their allied advocacy groups have launched an intellectual campaign to normalize them before legislation appears. Among the most influential voices is Gabriel Zucman, the French‑American economist whose work on tax havens and supposed wealth inequality opened the door for wealth taxes. He promotes the idea that billionaires pay too little, that global coordination is essential (implying the need for a future world government), and that wealth taxes are now inevitable.
Populists love the simplistic: “Tax the Rich,” but they never mention that even confiscating all the wealth of the top one percent would change nothing in the medium or long term. Seizing the entire $45–50 trillion held by the top 1% of Americans would provide only a short-lived fiscal sugar high. Even if liquidation were possible—which it isn’t—it would fund federal spending for only four to five years, leaving the structural drivers of deficits untouched. And because most top‑tier wealth is tied up in companies, real estate, and financial assets, converting it into spendable revenue would collapse the very value being seized. Much of it would evaporate before anyone benefited.
Whatever remained would be absorbed by existing obligations—debt service, entitlements, and baseline operations—leaving the public with little more than a temporary patch. In practice, most of the confiscated wealth would disappear through market destruction or be consumed by government itself, leaving society no more prosperous than before. And, of course, what goes unmentioned is that confiscating wealth would set up the largest class warfare fight America has ever seen, resulting in our dissolution.
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While some would inevitably find emotional satisfaction in punishing wealth creators, the real‑world result would be catastrophic: the destruction of the producer class and the unraveling of the economic system that feeds everyone else. It’s a reality the Marxist and Marxist‑adjacent socialists would prefer you not think about, as it would demonstrate the reality of their false rhetoric and their dishonesty.
I’ve always liked the adage “Need a job? Don’t ask a poor person,” and its corollary, “Need a job? Don’t ask the government.” Yet millions reject this truism because of what they’ve been taught. The laws of economics are far more immutable than most people realize.
Economic forces don’t bend just because policymakers wish they would. History is full of examples proving that prices, incentives, scarcity, and human behavior govern no matter how ambitious the political goal. Governments can cap rents, fix wages, seize profits, or impose new taxes. The underlying dynamics—reduced supply, distorted investment, capital flight, and shifts in productivity—always exact an even greater price. You can ignore these laws for a while, but you can’t escape the consequences when they push back. The best example is President Roosevelt’s disastrous recovery from the Great Depression, which lasted until the start of WWII bailed out the country.
At some point, every system that demands endless revenue growth runs out of room to grow, and government is no exception. We are approaching the mathematical limits of what can be taxed, borrowed, or confiscated without triggering economic and social collapse. The sooner we accept that reality, the sooner we can begin the hard but necessary work of designing a government that fits within the productive capacity of the society that funds it. That means spending less, prioritizing essentials, and abandoning the fantasy that new taxes can paper over structural excess, as if that were even possible. Higher taxation always has an endpoint—history, economics, and simple arithmetic all agree on that. The only question is whether we confront it deliberately now or wait until the system forces the reckoning on its own terms and likely at the worst possible time.
Author, Businessman, Thinker, and Strategist. Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow at 1plus1equals2.com.
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