Should We Still Pay Taxes?

I have been paying taxes since 1965. That’s sixty years of watching my money leave my hands and disappear into something I was taught was the common good. For most of those years, I believed it. The U.S. interstate highway system was being built. Medicare came along. Social Security was already there. I could see what my taxes were buying, and even when I disagreed with specific choices, I understood the basic transaction: you pay in, society gets something back.

That transaction is now broken. Not slightly off, not in need of minor adjustments. Broken.

Let me start with the Pentagon, because it is the most obvious and least discussed failure in American public life. The Department of Defense has never — not once — passed a full independent audit. Not in 2018 when they first tried. Not in 2019. Not in 2020, 2021, 2022, or any year since. We are talking about an institution that receives a trillion dollars a year from taxpayers and cannot tell you where the money goes. In the private sector, a CFO who couldn’t pass an audit would be gone by Friday. At the Pentagon, it is just a thing that happens every year, like the changing of the leaves.

I am not against a strong defense. Although I am anti-war, I grew up during the Cold War. I remember duck-and-cover drills and genuine fear of nuclear annihilation. I understand what defense spending is supposed to do. But there is a profound difference between spending money on actual security and spending money on a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that has figured out how to be too big and too complicated to be held accountable by anyone.

The F-35 fighter jet program is the single most expensive weapons program in human history — over $1.7 trillion over its lifetime. It has been plagued by cost overruns, design flaws, and delays for two decades. The plane has more software bugs than a beta release of a startup’s first product. And yet the contracts keep flowing, the money keeps moving, and the defense contractors who built it keep reporting record profits. Meanwhile the plane still can’t fully perform the missions it was designed for. If you or I ran a business this way, we would be bankrupt or in prison. The Pentagon calls it procurement.

The real reason this keeps happening is not incompetence. I want to be clear about that. It is set up this way on purpose. Defense contractors have learned that the best way to protect a program from cancellation is to spread its manufacturing across as many congressional districts as possible. You make a piece of the plane in Ohio, another piece in Texas, another in California, and suddenly every member of Congress has a local jobs argument for keeping the program alive regardless of whether it works. The waste is not a bug. It is a feature that serves everyone in the system except the taxpayer.

Now let me tell you about healthcare, which is a different kind of theft but theft nonetheless.

The United States spends more on healthcare per person than any other country on earth. Not by a little. By a lot. And our outcomes — life expectancy, infant mortality, management of chronic disease — are mediocre by developed-world standards. We are paying Porsche prices for a used Hyundai with a transmission problem. If you have ev

\’ tried to understand an Explanation of Benefits from your insurance company, you already know that the system is not designed to be understood. It is designed to be endured.

Medicare and Medicaid fraud alone are estimated to cost somewhere between $60 and $100 billion every year. Home health agencies bill for visits that never happened. Durable medical equipment companies charge for wheelchairs never delivered to real patients.

Pharmacies run pill mill schemes. Physicians bill for procedures performed on patients who were dead at the time. I am not making that last one up. It shows up in federal prosecutions every year. The fraud is so widespread and so normalized that catching it has become its own industry, with whistleblower attorneys making fortunes from lawsuits against providers who stole from the government.

Yet the fraud is almost a distraction from the larger structural waste, which is less dramatic but far more expensive.

We have built an administrative apparatus around healthcare billing that consumes roughly a quarter of every dollar spent. Hospitals employ armies of people whose only job is to navigate the coding and claims systems of hundreds of different payers, each with their own rules, their own forms, their own appeals processes.

Every other developed country figured out decades ago that a single unified payment system eliminates most of that waste. We have not done this, not because it wouldn’t work, but because the insurance industry has enough political power to prevent it.

I am 85 years old. I have watched this country spend money on good things and bad things, smart things and stupid things. I have seen government work and I have seen it fail.

What I have not seen before — not at this scale — is a system that has become so good at protecting its own inefficiency that reform feels genuinely impossible. Even Elon Musk gave up in disgust.

The people who benefit from Pentagon waste are not hiding in caves. They are at cocktail parties in McLean and lobbying offices on K Street and board meetings in Falls Church. The people who benefit from healthcare fraud and complexity are not cartoon villains. They are executives with fiduciary duties to shareholders and lawyers doing exactly what the law permits.

The system is not broken because bad people broke it. It is broken because smart people built it this way on purpose, incrementally, over decades, with your money and mine.

And now the only way they can think of to rectify it is to cut services to the very people who pay for them. Donald Trump said recently that we can’t afford to pay for health care and food subsidies. After all, we have a $39 trillion debt.

But before we cut out essential programs that we the people have paid for, let’s really audit them. I choose the Defense Department and Health and Human Services to go first. If we can fix them, I bet we have money to pay for everything else.

So yes. Think about your taxes. Think about them every single day. And then think about when was the last time you have demanded — really demanded — anything back. And then tell your Congressperson you want value from your tax money or you will stop sending it. If enough of us did that, things would change. Among other things, we wouldn’t have a $39 trillion debt.