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where does our tax money go?

This is a pretty easy question to answer given that you’re talking about a public institution.

The only difficulty is that the answer is complex and requires reading and understanding many sets of financial reports and accompanying minutes et cetera.

a city near me just bought 32 benches at the cost of 70k€ EACH

That’s a pretty absurd claim, and simply not how budgets in public institutions work.

Sure there might have been some kind of fuckup so installation of one of 32 benches cost $70k, or any number of other plausible explanations, but large public institutions don’t just throw $2.25m EUR at the end of a quarter as a budget stuffing exercise.

How could this ever be a reasonable idea, regardless of this mother’s heritage.

Even if they’re only applied with good intentions, it’s still so obviously wrong.

I feel like people are somehow stupider.

In Australia in the 80s there was very strong opposition to the introduction of tax file numbers, similar to a social security number I guess - merely a unique identifier for tax paying citizens. It was considered an over reach by the government, and an unnecessary way to track and monitor citizens.

Now 45 years later those same people who were resistant to this type of identifier, like my parents, are nodding along with the conservatives who are trying to implement AI surveillance everywhere saying how necessary it is to protect us all from evil crime doers.