I mean I paid for it like I would anything else I wanted. They charge a tax at checkout. So if I buy a house and pay the whole thing off, why do I still have to pay taxes on said house when I paid the whole agreed on price in full? It would be like me buying a six pack of beer I pay for it and tax at checkout. But then timely I have to keep paying taxes on the beer even though paid in full?
Ultimately, it is cheaper for EVERYONE if we all just pitch in a little. You may pay a little for schools that you don’t have kids to go to, but you pay LESS for things like roads, sewers, and trash disposal.
This isn’t a min-max system where you can adjust to only what you use and come out ahead. If you try, you end up paying more. Not just in the services themselves, but in the administration and middle management of the systems to handle calculating who used each system and how much they used it.
So as a community, we all pitch in and we all benefit.
We should all be fucking PROUD to pay taxes. We should be proud that our money goes towards educating all the people around us. We should be proud that we have parks and schools where children can play, learn, and grow up safely. We should be proud we have fire and medical teams who dedicate their life to helping others and keeping them safe on the worst day of people’s lives. We should be proud to live in places that are attractively maintained. We should be proud to spend our money on conserving the environment around us. We should be fucking proud to have libraries that lend out not just books, but tools and board games and toys. We should be proud that we pay so we don’t have to live in sewage and trash infested places.
We should be PROUD to pay taxes.