Government Takes 80%: How Big Steals Your Money, Freedom and Future

Americans are finally awakening to the harsh reality that the vast majority of us are struggling financially. Few of us understand why and therefore many are falling prey to political solutions, such as socialism, that will only make matters worse.This book will explain why average Americans are in economic distress. The cause is not particularly complicated or difficult to explain, and its origin is clear. What has obscured the cause and the origin is that the decline happened slowly over time. No single dramatic event can be blamed. Another reason why the cause of decline has eluded diagnosis is that much of its damage has been invisible to the naked eye. To paraphrase Frederic Bastiat, the invisible and long-term consequences of government policies must be reckoned with, yet for obvious reasons, they are generally ignored.This book will address both problems. We will compare the years 1900 and 2026 and learn that the cost of government crept up on us slowly over time while we were oblivious to it all. Second, with the assistance of AI (Grok) we will methodically delineate the invisible costs and consequences of government policies, then calculate them in dollars and add them to the more visible costs to prove the thesis and title of the book.