Everything costs more. Everything is monitored.
Everything feels designed to take—your wallet, your time, your freedom.
The government has turned everyday life into a revenue stream: funding endless wars, bloated agencies, surveillance systems, and profit-driven policing… all on your dime. You’re not just paying taxes. You’re paying to be watched. Paying to be policed. Paying to be controlled.
This isn’t government—it’s a business model. By now, it has become painfully clear that the only economic plan being advanced by the Trump administration enriches the oligarchy at the expense of everyone else. This is Donald Trump’s “let them eat cake” moment.
Tens of millions in one year alone for the president’s weekend golf trips while government agencies are dismantled and tens of thousands of federal workers have their jobs slashed. According to the web tracker “Did Trump Golf Today?” Trump has spent 23.5% of his presidency golfing at an estimated cost of $141 million to taxpayers.
An extra $200 billion in additional defense funding so Pete Hegseth can make a game out of war with Iran. More than $16 billion was spent in the first 12 days of Trump’s war on Iran—excluding rising costs of gas and consumer goods or long-term war injuries.
$22 million in one month on lobsters and ribeye steak so the Defense Department wouldn’t risk losing taxpayer-funded budget. $1.8 million for musical instruments, including a “$98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, a $26,000 violin, and a $21,750 custom handmade flute from luxury Japanese brand Muramatsu.”
$400 million for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom most taxpayers will never enter.
While members of Trump’s inner circle dine on lobster and filet mignon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests Americans struggling with beef costs should buy “cheap cuts” like liver. Meanwhile, the rest of the country absorbs a higher cost of living driven by Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and policies that punish the many to benefit the few.
At every turn, claims of slashing government spending translate into greater expense for taxpayers—with little to show for it. DOGE layoffs may reduce federal workforce size on paper but result in taxpayers footing unemployment benefits instead of salaries.
Trump’s drop in police misconduct oversight effectively greenlights police violence—but taxpayers still pay for lawsuits and settlements.
In the eyes of Trump and his cohorts, you are not a citizen—you are a revenue stream, and the government is cashing in.
Call it taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, or asset forfeitures: the only word describing the constant bilking of American taxpayers by government and corporate partners is theft.
We’re living in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where government and its allies aren’t stealing from the rich to feed the poor—they’re stealing from the poor, middle class, and those not politically connected to enrich the powerful.
The result? Poorer people, richer elites, and the American Dream replaced by a surveillance state propped up by endless war, crippling debt, and legalized plunder.
Americans still fail to grasp this: if government can take your property, income, privacy, and freedom at will, you don’t have rights—you have privileges.
The American police state—surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT raids, fusion centers, drones, AI tracking systems, predictive policing algorithms, asset forfeiture schemes, and privatized prisons—is not about safety. It is a multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem designed to move money from taxpayers into corporate hands under justifications of “security,” “law and order,” or “national emergency.”
These justifications now expand to include artificial intelligence, foreign adversaries, domestic extremism, and a permanent state of war abroad. The real motive has remained the same: control populations, monetize systems, and channel wealth upward.
Follow the money—and the truth becomes impossible to ignore. The government isn’t serving you—it’s billing you.
The same government that claims it cannot afford healthcare, education, or housing finds unlimited funds for war—ending with the bill due to taxpayers.
In this new economy, you are no longer just a citizen: You are a revenue stream, a data point, a potential suspect, and a body to be managed. Whether through taxes, fines, surveillance, or forced labor, the system extracts value from you at every life stage.
The cost is not merely financial—it is constitutional. Every dollar poured into this machinery erodes your privacy, property, due process rights, freedom of movement, and free speech.
As I detail in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the real bottom line: You are paying for the erosion of your own freedoms.
Until that changes, theft will continue—and the only question left is how much remains to steal.