Facebook X Email Print Save Story Lately, I’ve been thinking about all the wonderful investments that I, a taxpayer in the United States of America, have made. I’m not just talking about my obvious support of the common good—the almost five billion free lunches each year for schoolkids who might otherwise go hungry, the health-care coverage for sixty-seven million seniors and disabled people, the four-hundred-plus national parks, the hundred and sixty thousand miles of national highways. I’m talking about stuff you’ve never heard of, stuff that does not spring to mind alongside the phrase “Your tax dollars at work”: the rescue of more than a hundred children illegally employed in meat slaughterhouses across eight states; the removal of hundreds of tons of hazardous materials from the wreckage of the Maui wildfires ; the design of the world’s first tornado-resistant building codes, which address a kind of natural disaster that kills more Americans annually than earthquakes and hurricanes combined.
Mull on all that the next time you see your own taxes subtracted from your pay stub. The federal government has a budget of more than six trillion dollars and is the nation’s largest employer—bigger than Amazon or Walmart—with a full-time civilian workforce of more than two million people, eighty-five per cent of whom work outside of the nation’s capital. No doubt you’ve met a few of these employees: the T.
S.A. officer who summoned you back to security when .