You pay Social Security over your working life, and when you start collecting your meager benefits (meager versus what they would have been had you been free to invest your money all those years) you get taxed on them. From Donald Jeffries at donaldjeffries.substack.com:
Involuntary extortion on a grand scale
This country fought a war for independence over taxation without representation. The Founders really, really didn’t like taxes. They dressed up as Indians at the Boston Tea Party. Over a pretty small tax on tea. They became incensed over a similarly modest tax on stamps. Our forebears called these things the Intolerable Acts.
Since the early 1770s, our increasingly tyrannical government has implemented a lot of Intolerable Acts. Many people don’t realize that, until 1913, there was no income tax in the United States. You may well ask, how did they fund the government for well over a century without one? We had a growing military force, which Thomas Jefferson and the other wisest Founders would have opposed, a post office, roads and bridges. The odious withholding tax, which the beloved Franklin D. Roosevelt assured us would be but a temporary measure, dates from the 1930s. But as with so many unconstitutional encroachments, the concept began under Abraham Lincoln, to help fund his senseless war. As everyone knows, they are still withholding a portion of pay for every employee on a payroll.
I’m brooding over this subject, after having our taxes prepared last week. I knew we’d probably owe money, because all of the income I earn now is untaxed. I write off what expenses I can against it, but really anything more than negligible untaxed income is going to destroy any chance of a refund. Now most of my income comes from Social Security. You know, the money they withheld from me for forty five years or so. I’m pretty sure that fits the definition of a tax. I thought I knew how bad the system was, but having had my taxes done after collecting Social Security for the first time, I became a bit more educated. It is even worse that I expected, which is really saying something.
The list of taxes is endless and most don’t realize that almost all of their money is paid to the taxman. Sales tax, every time you buy something you have to pay a tax to buy it or trade. Excise taxes, hidden in the utility bills you pay. Inflation, the worst tax of all and they lie about the rate, pretend that it is only 8% when gas, food and energy double because of the money printing devaluing your money, it makes saving money for a purchase a dwindling proposition. All of these things hurt the poor people the most, those who are already living on the edge, just take one more dime from them, it won’t hurt. Buy a house and they take a loan out against it calling it a bond for ‘schools’ and other trustworthy causes. You buy tools and pay taxes, after paying income taxes for earning money with those tools the state then wants to tax your tools because you made a living with them. Purchase a vehicle for transportation, pay a yearly tax or they won’t let you drive it. Jefferson once wrote that if they ever instituted a fiat banking system there would be taxes on everything, transportation, meat and drink, on every activity that man might be involved in. America is there. The only rights left are those they grant you. If you defend yourself against an armed criminal the state will be trying to find a way to tax you for that.
The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters.
Ludwig von Mises