Tax Cattle: How the American Taxpayer Became the World's Banker No nation on earth asks its citizens to financially sustain nearly 200 foreign governments simultaneously, yet that is precisely what the United States does. In fiscal year 2022 alone, the US spent over $70 billion in foreign aid to nearly 200 countries, territories, and geographic regions, federal budget resources, extracted from the paychecks of working Americans who had no vote on the matter. The Numbers Are Staggering In 2024, Israel received $6.8 billion in US aid, edging out Ukraine at $6.5 billion, making them the top two recipients. But those are single-year figures. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has received over $300 billion in inflation-adjusted US dollars, making it the single largest cumulative recipient of American foreign aid since World War II. Between 1946 and 2024, roughly 30% of all US foreign aid, over $1 trillion adjusted for inflation, flowed to just five countries: Israel, Egypt, South Vietnam, Afghanistan, and South Korea. The American taxpayer did not build these nations' futures, they were simply billed for them. A Bipartisan Racket This is not a Democrat or Republican problem, it is a Washington problem. In April 2024, the Senate voted 79-18 to pass a $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Only 18 senators, the Thomas Massies and Ron Pauls of the upper chamber, had the spine to vote no. The rest, Republicans and Democrats alike, the Lindsey Grahams and the neoconservative consensus that Pat Buchanan spent his career fighting, lined up to write checks with other people's money. Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro will call you an antisemite or a Putin puppet for questioning a single dollar of it. That is how the racket is protected. What Jefferson Would Say Thomas Jefferson warned that a nation burdened by perpetual debt and foreign entanglements could not long remain free. He was right. The American taxpayer today is not a citizen in the Jeffersonian sense, a self-governing individual sovereign over his own labor. He is a revenue source, farmed annually by a political class that has decided the security and prosperity of foreign governments takes priority over the crumbling bridges, unpayable medical bills, and hollowed-out towns of the people footing the tab. No other wealthy nation operates this way. Germany, Japan, and France do not extract wealth from their working and middle classes to fund 170-plus foreign governments at gunpoint via the tax code. The 2015 Trump Promise, Broken The Trump who stood on that 2015 debate stage and called the Iraq War a lie and questioned why Americans were subsidizing the defense of wealthy allies, that Trump spoke the language of Buchanan and Paul. He spoke for the taxpayer who had been told for decades that there was no money for his infrastructure, his pension, or his child's school, but somehow unlimited money existed for foreign wars and foreign governments. The Trump of 2025, surrounded by neoconservative handlers, signed the largest military aid packages in modern history. The revolution was captured, and the billing continues. America First Means Americans First A paleoconservative foreign policy is not cruel or isolationist. It simply insists on a foundational principle: the primary obligation of the American government is to the American people. Charity begins at home. Defense begins at the border. And the tax dollars of a mechanic in Ohio, a nurse in Georgia, or a farmer in Kansas belong first to the republic that produced them, not to governments halfway around the world whose interests may have nothing to do with American security, American values, or American survival.