chapotraphouse

This is the implicit idea reinforced every time Americans talk about “taxpayer dollars”: they’re trained to believe that money is somehow created out of nothing by wealthy capitalists, and that the US federal government can only keep running as long as it gets enough “investment” from “taxpayers”. They believe the government owes the poor nothing and what little it provides them is charity, because “it wasn’t their taxes that paid for it”. They’re indignant every time the government does something they don’t personally like because they believe it has a fiduciary duty to “taxpayers” (themselves) over anything else like a publicly traded company has a fiduciary duty to shareholders.