Several years ago, I was reporting on a school board’s consideration of whether to build a new middle school.
“Now is the time to do it,” the school superintendent told the board. “The new school will put us over our debt limit and the state will make the payments.”
“The school will essentially be free,” he said
I asked him whether the taxpayers might consider where the state would get the money.
“Most people don’t think about that,” he said.
He was correct, of course. Most of us loudly complain about our taxes with no idea what they pay for.
A gentleman went to the township supervisors as they prepared the new budget to say that the town’s volunteer fire department needed new radios.
“We’re a little short on money,” the chairman told him, “and we’re trying to keep from increasing taxes this year.”
“Why would you raise taxes for new radios?” the gentleman asked. “Can’t the town just come up with the money like it does everything else.”
“When you pay your taxes, where do you think the money goes?” the supervisor asked.
“I don’t know. I just give it to the tax collector and she takes care of it,” the man replied.
The farther we are from where the money is spent, the less we know about what it is spent on. Normally, we complain a bit, pay the tithe, and move on until next year, trusting in the meantime that our roads will be maintained and the evening weather person will tell us when a hurricane is about to wash those roads into the sea.
We are about to get an education as the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency shuts down, seemingly with joyous abandon and virtually no concern about the effects, many of our trusted agencies.
Much of the federal budget savings will turn out to be cost shifting rather than cost cutting. We are about to be introduced to mass Privatization, turning government processes over to for-profit commercial interests.
Our local television station proclaims “the Susquehanna Valley’s only doppler radar,” carefully failing to mention that We The People have purchased that radar and still own and maintain it, through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service. NWS collects and compiles data from around the globe and turns it into the information local weather forecasters refine for local use.
We The People also pay for the equipment and salaries of NOAA scientists, Social Security office workers, and doctors and support people at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health and the myriad university and hospital-based research centers that kept us all from dying of Covid-19.
If all the cuts stick in place, they will cut some pennies from the federal budget, but we will soon discover the cost of taking control of disease and medicine research out of public discussion and placing it within the closed-door profit collection of Pfizer and Moderna.
For instance, during Covid, we all had access to test kits we were told were “free,” but in truth we paid with our tax money and bolstered the profits of Lucerna and Abbott.
And though fossil fuel producers knew 50 years ago there was a wealth of oil and gas trapped in certain shale formations, it was the taxpayer-funded scientists at the federal Bureau of Energy who figured out how to make fracking profitable.
As Rep. Gerry Connolly, the Northern Virginia Democrat who is the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, tweeted recently, “When you go private, the profit motive is everything.”
If you think neoliberalism is bad as an academic concept, wait’ll you see privatization of the government as it proclaims its intent to “save money.”
Text and Images ©2025 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, nemophilist and social anthropologist living in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@admin
