We, the people

(I wrote this over a decade ago while living in Budapest. Things have changed. It's gotten worse.)

We are the people. We pay taxes. These taxes are usually deducted from our salaries at source. We pay additional taxes when we buy gasoline. Those taxes are buried in the price of the gas. We know this because the poverty-stricken oil companies remind us that the reason gas is so expensive is because of the government.

We pay additional tax when we buy alcoholic beverages or cigarettes. These are often referred to as 'Sin Taxes'. Many people voluntarily increase their tax payments by purchasing government-issued lottery tickets. We pay additional taxes when we purchase items at the retail level; items like clothing for our children and other such luxuries.

We pay taxes to fund pension funds for elected officials, even though many of us little people have no such pension in our future. We pay taxes to fund public work projects that are too often awarded to companies or individuals who have provided financial incentives (a.k.a. kickbacks) to the bureaucrats who award the contracts. Logically, the cost of those financial incentives are buried in the cost of the project, so we are funding those kickbacks as well as the project itself.

If we go out to a restaurant, we pay tax on our meal. For almost any purchase we make with what is left in our salary, we pay a sales tax. In Hungary, that tax is a whopping 27%.

We fund wars we don't want to fight. We fund trade junkets where our elected officials and business leaders travel to distant tourist locales to promote our nation's companies. We are told promoting our nation's businesses is good for our economy. We are not told of the numerous off-shore banking schemes many of these corporations create in order to avoid taxes; the taxes we, the people, cannot avoid.

In America, we funded the bail-out of Detroit's automotive industry but we didn't bail out Detroit. It laid in ruins. We funded Wall Street bail-outs but apparently we didn't have enough money or resolve to fund legislative change to reign in Wall Street.

In Canada, we funded the life-long Senate appointees and their lavish, unjustifiable, home-away-from-home living expenses that often amount to more than twice as much as what the average Canadian earns annually. Before taxes.

In Hungary, those who do pay tax shoulder the burden of funding an over-extended and deteriorating healthcare system, among with other social programs in desperate need of additional cash.

Yet despite the taxes we, the people pay, our governments are telling us we simply do not pay enough to sustain the level and depth of services and social programs we rely on. Such as garbage collection. In order to cut costs (a euphemism for "jobs") many services have been outsourced to companies who invariably pay workers less and/or provide fewer, if any benefits.

Governments everywhere are cash strapped as are we, the people.

On the other hand, companies like Google, Starbucks and Amazon are not cash strapped. Nor are they paying the kind of taxes we the little people pay. They are creating complex corporate structures with many off-shore subsidiaries existing in a stateless, tax-free environment. Yet these companies cannot compare to Apple. At the time of this writing, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, is addressing a congressional panel that has taken exception to Apple's unprecedented, intercontinental corporate structure that has helped it avoid paying billions in taxes. According to a recent article in the New York Times, between 2009 and 2012, Apple has managed to shift $74 billion out of reach of the Internal Revenue Service.

According to tax experts, Washington is having to rely more and more on we, the

people than America's industries to fund America's operations. Payroll and individual taxes contribute $1.1 trillion to the federal piggy bank while corporations contributed just $181 billion.

When Viktor & co made a tax grab on the banks and telecoms the corporate world slammed Hungary and declared Hungary unstable for investment. Corporations don't like unpredictability, they said.

No, corporations like predictability. They like tax lawyers. They like loopholes. And almost as much as they like the staggering bonuses they pay to their executives and almost as much as they like to keep shareholders happy with dividends and share growth; almost as much, corporations like we, the people. Because we, the people, are Facebook's product. We, the people, are the lemmings who foolishly flock to the likes of Apples iTunes and line-up to buy the latest iPhone. We, the people, clutch our Starbuck's butterscotch ice cappuccino with one hand while we text message with the other. We, the people, fund the corporations with our after-tax dollars. That spending, we're told, is good because money from our purchases go back into the economy. Only it often doesn't. It often goes offshore, out of the economy and out of the country to a virtual off-shore kingdom, comprised solely of money. No bricks. No mortar. No taxes. However, the one thing these virtual kingdoms do have is financial servants.

We, the people, are the modern day serfs in the 21st century feudal system.