So Why Are We Paying Taxes?

Necropolitics in America means paying taxes to a government digging our graves.

The Trump administration has cut more than three dozen federal agencies and programs that provide essential services in public health, education, science, disaster relief, environmental protection, global diplomacy, consumer safety, and civil rights. This administration is undermining the very infrastructure taxpayers fund to keep the country safe, informed, and functioning.

And for what exactly?

A rough estimate of savings totaling just $2 billion. This represents pennies in the context of the federal budget, but is catastrophic in human cost.

So I’ve been wondering, what exactly are we paying taxes for?

Tell me somethin’, if the government is gutting disaster relief, slashing education, choking off scientific research, firing health workers, and killing off programs that serve veterans, children, and the environment, what the hell are we funding? Because it damn sure ain’t the public good.

We’re still handing over money every paycheck, every grocery run, every gallon of gas, only to watch that money funnel into tax breaks for billionaires, military toys, and corporate subsidies while essential services keep getting axed.

How is it that we’re still expected to fund a government that’s actively dismembering itself limb by limb, agency by agency while claiming it’s in the name of “efficiency” or “fiscal responsibility?” What kind of democracy demands obedience from taxpayers but offers nothing in return but layoffs, deregulation, and disaster? Fiscal responsibility is the GOP’s favorite euphemism for killing people.

The Anatomy of Cruelty

What we’re seeing isn’t random slashing. Nah, it’s strategic. And don’t get it twisted, many of the programs being gutted are the ones that provide a lifeline to Black, Brown, poor, disabled, and working-class communities.

For example, it’s no accident that the Department of Education’s civil rights arm is being hollowed out. Already, schools with racist discipline practices are operating with impunity, suspending Black children at three times the rate of their white peers. Now, those schools are essentially unregulated playgrounds for systemic abuse.

They’re cutting Title I funds. Teacher equity programs. DEI initiatives. Federal grants that help low-income students get to college. Everything that might give a Black or Brown child a fighting chance to thrive is being systematically defunded. This isn’t about efficiency, it’s about control. It’s about keeping those kids in their place. Ignorant. Dependent. Disposable.

Environmental Cuts Are Environmental Violence

Environmental cuts are death warrants. When the Trump administration gutted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), eliminated climate resilience programs, and slashed funding for air and water quality monitoring, they were drawing a red line through the lives of Black, Brown, and poor communities surrounded by eco hazards.

Communities of color are already the ones breathing in the most polluted air, drinking from poisoned pipes, and living in flood-prone zones with crumbling infrastructure. The administration didn’t just ignore this reality, they intensified it. They stripped funding from the very programs designed to protect us: lead remediation, Superfund cleanups, air quality enforcement, water testing. All of it decimated.

This isn’t incompetence. This is policy. They know damn well that Black children in cities like Flint and Jackson are already showing signs of lead poisoning and saying: “Let them drink death.” They know that asthma rates in Black communities are through the roof and choosing to let fossil fuel corporations regulate themselves. They know that rural, poor, Black communities are drowning in raw sewage and still revoking consent decrees that promised to fix it just because they had a “DEI” label on them.

This isn’t budget management. This is environmental violence. This is slow-motion genocide dressed up as fiscal discipline. When the government defunds clean air and water protections, it’s not saving money, it’s choosing who gets to breathe.

Healthcare Cuts Are a Racist Death Sentence

Then there’s healthcare.

This is the battlefield where America’s racism puts on scrubs. Under Trump, healthcare wasn’t just cut. It was butchered. Medicaid was slashed by trillions. The Affordable Care Act was gutted. The CDC saw nearly half its budget evaporate. And the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services are being starved into irrelevance.

The Office for Civil Rights is supposed to ensure that hospitals don’t discriminate. That Black women aren’t left to hemorrhage in labor. That trans people aren’t denied life-saving care. That disabled people aren’t warehoused and ignored. So why would an administration that thrives on cruelty keep that office alive?

They wouldn’t. And they didn’t.

Because this is the same administration that let a pandemic rip through Black and Brown communities while denying the science, mocking the dead, telling people to drink bleach, and then blaming us for our own deaths. This is the same regime that said if you don’t have a job, you don’t deserve healthcare. That Medicaid should come with a work requirement, even in communities where jobs don’t exist. That access to care is a reward for productivity, not a human right.

Every healthcare cut is a racist calculation.

Black folks die from every disease at higher rates—diabetes, hypertension, cancer, maternal mortality—not because we’re biologically inferior, but because the system is built to deny us care. We are forced to navigate racist doctors, underfunded clinics, insurance we can’t afford, and hospitals that don’t exist in our zip codes. And now the government’s answer to this public health crisis is to pull the plug on the institutions meant to fix it.

Cutting healthcare for the most vulnerable while padding military and police budgets isn’t austerity. It’s using policy to let people die. And just like always, Black death is the baseline America is willing to accept. Or worse, encourage.

Neoliberal Necropolitics at Work

What we are witnessing in this current political moment is necropolitics in full bloom, ruling through slow death and neglect. Terms like “efficiency” or “streamlining government” mask a violent calculus that decides Black and Brown communities aren’t worth the investment. You dismantle education, healthcare, housing, public media, environmental justice, scientific research and you guarantee that people living at society’s margins will suffer first and worst.

Cutting NIH, CDC, NSF, NOAA, NASA science budgets by 40–55% isn’t a rational cost‑saving measure. It’s a deliberate downgrading of capacity to respond to pandemics, climate disasters, and emerging health threats. That decision forces communities of color to pay the price when crises hit, yet they funded the system from day one.

Black Tax, White Neglect

This ain’t nothin’ new. We’ve seen this shit before. At least Black folks have.

Consider this historically: Black Americans have always paid taxes into a government that neglects or harms us. From Reconstruction through Jim Crow, from redlining to mass incarceration, it has been the same story. Now, federal budget policy enforces that trauma at scale. Tax money goes in, Black communities lose out.

Austerity is always sold as a clean‑up act but in practice, it means drawing a new death map. “Survive this” becomes the norm for schools, hospitals, environmental protections. The administration’s skinny budget sets work requirements on Medicaid and punishes immigrants. These are strategies to make survival itself a battlefield. If you’re poor, undocumented, transgender, disabled, or Black then you’re excluded. That’s necropolitical design.

Yes, Cruelty Is the Point

The through-line of all of this is cruelty. It’s not incidental. It’s the core feature. This is about making Black and Brown people suffer. It’s about ensuring they remain poor, uneducated, unhealthy, and voiceless. If you die because you couldn’t get insulin, that’s not a glitch in the system, that means the plan worked. If your child never learns to read because their school has no books or teachers or heat, that was the goal.

Every cut is a moral decision. And this administration has made clear who they believe deserves to live with dignity and who deserves to die quietly.

So I Ask Y’all Again, Why Are We Paying Taxes?

Why are we still forking over our hard-earned money to a government that’s gutting the very services we need to survive?

We pay for border walls while our children drink lead. We pay for F-35 fighter jets while rural hospitals shutter. We pay for ICE raids while our elders die on waiting lists. We pay for drone strikes while babies in Mississippi die from untreated RSV.
We pay for oil subsidies while wildfire smoke chokes our lungs. We pay for tax cuts for millionaires while people ration insulin. We pay for war after war while mothers bleed out in maternity wards with no OB-GYN for 200 miles.

Why are we paying into a system that funds our own erasure? What kind of democracy robs its people blind and calls it patriotism?

We are funding our own oppression. Again. We are paying taxes to be ignored, exploited, poisoned, silenced, killed. This isn’t about civic duty anymore. This is about extraction. We give, and give, and give and the return is death.

Black folks especially have always known this truth. Our tax dollars built schools we were banned from attending. Funded neighborhoods we weren’t allowed to live in. Paid the salaries of police who beat the hell out off us and killed us. Funded wars we died in, only to come home and be denied a loan, a job, a vote, and lynched.

And now, under this administration, we’re being told once again that we must sacrifice even more. That our communities must bear the brunt of cuts made in the name of "efficiency." That we should smile and wave as they dismember the last protections we had left.

And it’s not just Black people anymore, it’s happening at scale. Poor folks. Working-class families. Immigrants. Disabled people. Rural communities. Queer and trans people. Everyone on the margins is being fed into the same machinery that Black people have been crushed by for centuries. The system that was perfected on us is now being deployed everywhere.

It’s time to ask, loudly and without apology: So why are we paying taxes?

Because if this is what we're funding, starvation, abandonment, and slow death, we deserve better. Or we deserve to stop funding it. Period.

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