The Government’s Real Fiscal Problem Isn’t Taxes. It’s Trust.

10 min read

Picture this.

You graduated college, did the responsible thing, and moved back home while you got on your feet. Your parents offered you the ADU, the little unit out back. You pay rent. Real rent. Every month, on time. You're not asking for a handout. You're a tenant.

Except the hot water goes out every other week. The heat cuts off in January. There's a leak in the ceiling they've been "getting to" for eight months. You've asked, nicely and then not so nicely, what the rent money is actually going toward, because the place isn't getting better. It's getting worse.

Then one morning your dad knocks on the door and says rent is going up next month.

No explanation. No repair timeline. No accounting of where the last twelve months of payments went.
Just more. Because they need it.

And here's the part that really gets you: you open Instagram that afternoon and there they are. Dinner at a place you can't afford. Weekend trip you didn't know about. New furniture in the main house, the one you're not living in. Nothing wrong with that house.

You don't say a word. Because what do you say? They're your parents. They mean well. They talk about responsibility constantly. Do what I say, not what I do was practically the family motto.

Now imagine that friend (you know the one) who still owes you money from two years ago. Hasn't mentioned it once. But you see the posts. The vacations. The meals. And last week they texted asking to borrow more.

How do you feel?

There's a scene in The Pursuit of Happyness where Chris Gardner walks into his Dean Witter interview in a paint-stained shirt, no explanation, no apology. The interviewer asks what he would say if a man walked in with no shirt and still got the job. Gardner doesn't flinch: "He must've had on some really nice pants."

The room laughs. The tension breaks. Dean Witter has the power to find it charming, because Dean Witter has the power to walk away.

We don't.

The government has been showing up shirtless for decades. No receipts. No audit trail. No honest accounting of where the money went. And every time a taxpayer asks, they point to the pants — the intention, the program name, the press release. But unlike Dean Witter, you are not sitting across the table with the option to laugh it off or pass on the candidate. You are legally required to fund the hire. Refuse, and the conversation stops being uncomfortable and starts involving the IRS.

That feeling. That specific, exhausted, trapped feeling, is what millions of American taxpayers are living every time a new tax proposal hits the news cycle.

Someone needs to say it plainly.

Not to attack anyone personally. Not to score political points. But as a direct question to every elected official currently drafting, co-sponsoring, or cheerleading a bill that asks the American taxpayer for more money:

What happened to the last batch?

Because that question keeps not getting answered, and the proposals keep coming.

The Optics Problem Nobody Wants to Address

Senator Elizabeth Warren has become one of the loudest voices calling for taxes on unrealized capital gains. She’s targeting individuals worth over $100 million, painting billionaires like Elon Musk as the face of a broken, rigged economy.

The argument has surface-level appeal. Wealth concentration is real. The frustration behind it is legitimate.

But here's what also is real: Senator Warren's own net worth is estimated between $8 and $12 million, built during a career in public service and academia, including roughly $4.6 million in book advances and royalties since entering the Senate in 2013, and a Cambridge Victorian home that has appreciated more than tenfold since she purchased it for $447,000 in 1995.

That's not a gotcha. That's not an attack. That is simply what unrealized capital gains look like on paper, and it belongs in this conversation.

Meanwhile, a clip of Speaker Mike Johnson went viral recently, arguing that congressional members only earn $174,000 per year, that salaries haven't been raised since 2009, and that lawmakers essentially need the ability to trade stocks to take care of their families.

$174,000. Compared to a median household income of $83,730.

The framing that $174,000 isn't enough is the same energy behind "we need more tax revenue."
It's an ask for more without a reckoning with what already exists.

The question no one in that chamber is asking loudly enough: before we talk about what more we need, can we have an honest conversation about what we've done with what we have?

The System Already Has a Revenue Problem — It's Called Mismanagement

The Government Accountability Office released its 2025 High-Risk List this year. It flagged 38 federal programs as seriously vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. And, noted that GAO recommendations have generated approximately $84 billion in savings over the past two years alone.

Which means the problems were identifiable. The fixes were available. They just weren't enforced.

One program at the Department of Defense was found to be $280 million over budget and five years behind schedule, with more years of delay ahead. That's not a rounding error. That's a policy failure and nobody meaningful has been held accountable for it.

Here's what the current system produces: agencies can miss objectives, waste hundreds of millions, fail audits, ignore recommendations, and the people who managed those budgets move on to the next role.
No clawbacks. No bars from future public contracts. No consequence proportional to the harm.

Into that system, we are being asked to send more money.

Massachusetts Proved the Pattern Is Not a Conspiracy Theory

In November 2024, 72% of Massachusetts voters passed Question 1, a ballot initiative to authorize the State Auditor to audit the state Legislature.

Seventy-two percent. That's not a squeaker. That's a mandate.

The Legislature was the only state entity in Massachusetts that had refused to be audited. State Auditor Diana DiZoglio had been pushing for it for years before voters intervened. After the vote, the Legislature's response was to keep refusing, declining to respond to records requests, arguing separation of powers, and leaning on the Attorney General's office to slow-walk enforcement.

By early 2026, more than a year after voters spoke, DiZoglio filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court asking it to simply enforce the law the public passed.

That is the architecture of institutional self-protection. It is not dramatic. It is not a conspiracy. It is what happens every time a governing body is asked to be accountable to the people who fund it. The same people, by the way, who those same legislators represent.

If 72% of voters can't compel a state legislature to open its books, what makes anyone think new tax revenue will be handled differently?

The Call That Hasn't Been Made

This isn't a post demanding the end of taxation. That's not the argument.

The argument is this: somewhere in that building, there needs to be a voice willing to step into the crosshairs.

Not to grandstand. Not to position for a primary. But to stand up and say, before I sign anything that asks the American people for more money, I am going to demand accountability for what they've already sent.

That means:

Audit first, appropriate second. No new appropriation above a threshold should pass without an independent audit of where the previous allocation went and what it produced.

Real consequences for mismanagement. Not a $200 fine for a late filing. Not a strongly worded report. Clawbacks. Disqualification. Prosecutorial exposure for willful waste of public funds.

Blockchain-based public spending ledger. The technology exists today to record every appropriation, disbursement, and contract payment on an immutable public record visible to any citizen in real time. This is a design choice. The current design chooses opacity. Someone should propose the other design.

AI-assisted continuous budget monitoring. Large language models can already flag financial anomalies faster and more comprehensively than any traditional audit cycle. Deploy them across federal agencies, not to replace human accountability, but to surface problems before they compound for decades undetected.

Sunset all programs. No automatic renewal. Every program above a spending threshold gets an independent performance review before reauthorization. If it can't show outcomes, it doesn't get renewed, regardless of who championed it or how long it's been on the books.

What the Taxpayer Actually Needs

You may not own a Cambridge Victorian or have a book deal. But you are the one being asked to pay more.

The pattern is predictable. Proposals aimed at billionaires rarely stay there. The people being targeted have entire teams. Attorneys, accountants, trusts, tax specialists whose job is to find the distance between what the law says and what actually gets paid. They restructure. They adapt. They move on.

The framework stays. And once it exists, it expands. Thresholds drop. Exemptions narrow. The billionaire becomes the justification. The upper-middle class becomes the collection point.

Your IRA, investment account, appreciated home, those are the downstream conversation once the architecture is already built.

The energy should go toward demanding that whoever writes the next bill first stands up and says:

Here is what we did with the last one. Here is who was accountable. Here is what we're fixing before we ask for anything else.

That's not radical. It's the only responsible position.

At BMG, we believe trust is earned through transparency, discipline, and long-term thinking, not slogans.
If you want a portfolio strategy grounded in accountability and durability, let’s talk.

Content is for educational purposes and does not constitute investment, tax, or legal advice.