The Applause
As citizens, it is our duty to scrutinize our government with the same intensity we reserve for our enemies. Applaud when warranted, yes, but criticize with precision, always. This is the only path to an informative vote. Without friction, there is no heat; without heat, no change.
So let us look at the gift of no tax on tips. On the surface, it gleams. A policy for the people. A hand reaching down to lift the service worker. It feels good to cheer for this.
But surfaces are designed to be looked at, not through. Let us peel it.
The Ledger
Peel back the headline, and we find an economy of shadows. Those who earn little in tips already know the drill: don’t report them to the IRS. And those who report declare only a percentage, a quiet compromise between survival and compliance. It is common knowledge, unspoken at kitchen tables. The rich shelter millions in loopholes carved by architects they employ; the poor hide twenties for groceries. Both know the system is a game with weighted dice.
Here is what the government truly gains: When tips become untaxed, there is no penalty in reporting accurately. It is encouraged. Your income profile becomes complete. The state receives a map of your labor, your hours, your movement through the economy, all in exchange for a tax cut that costs the treasury little, because much of that money was invisible anyway.
They lose pennies. They gain visibility.
The Inversion
It is still good policy, perhaps, to let a waitress keep her twenties. But is this the ceiling of our imagination? Is this all we can expect from the stewards of our collective wealth?
We must stop speaking of government as a business. A business has owners, shareholders, a quarterly appetite. The government has none of these. It is not a corporation we serve; it is a team we hire, generation after generation, to manage the treasures and affairs of the nation. There is no boss. There is only we the people, passing the keys to the house we all own.
So why do we accept management that returns so little on our investment?
The Commons
Tell me: Why don’t our taxes purchase the best health insurance in the world—not subsidies, not networks, but full coverage, unconditional and excellent? Why doesn’t our money purchase the finest education, roads that do not crumble, air and water tested as rigorously as the food on a billionaire’s plate?
Consider what we already own. The airwaves, those electromagnetic depths that carry our voices—are ours. The public lands, the orbital paths above our heads, the mineral beds beneath our feet. These are the birthright of the commons, passed down like a family estate.
So why is our tax money given to one man to launch satellites in our unregulated sky? Why do we lease our own spectrum to corporations who then sell us access to what we already own? Why does our treasure not fund free WiFi in every square, clean energy in every grid, systems built by the passionate and accountable only to us?
We are landlords who pay rent to our tenants.
The Panopticon
Instead of inheritance, we receive higher prices and stagnant wages. Instead of science in healthcare, we receive algorithms for profit. We eat unregulated food, drown in unregulated waste, and watch wealth consolidate through unregulated finance.
And all the while, we live beneath a watch that never blinks. Twenty-four-hour surveillance, faceless, sleepless, recording. The architecture is not for safety; it is for extraction. The data flows upward, the wealth flows upward, and the risk rains down. The wealthy grow wealthier not despite our chaos, but because of it. The poor grow poorer not from laziness, but from design.
We are the most watched people in history, yet we know less about what is done in our names than any citizens before us.
The Separation
The surveillance is not optical; it is social. We have been programmed to hide from our friends, to vanish from the gaze of those who love us. We trade presence for performance, intimacy for encryption. Isolated, we become influenceable. Atomized, we become controllable.
We scroll past catastrophe until our emergency response is indistinguishable from boredom. We are numb to death, not because we are cruel, but because we are exhausted. The recording never stops, so neither do we, spinning in place, too busy surviving to remember we are supposed to be governing.
We are numb to death. And the first death is the death of we.