I love being taxed.

I know that’s not a popular thing to say. I know that in certain circles, expressing enthusiasm for taxation is like expressing enthusiasm for root canals, or jury duty, or the music they play in elevators. But I mean it sincerely, deeply, and with the full faith and credit of my emotional being: I love when the government takes my money. Because the government isn’t taking my money. It’s hugging it.

Think about it. When someone you love hugs you, they wrap their arms around you, squeeze, and then — eventually, sometimes — let go. That’s exactly what the government does with your paycheck. It wraps its massive, warm, bureaucratic arms around every dollar you earn, gives it a long, firm, loving squeeze, and then returns some of it to you. Not all of it. That would be a bad hug. A good hug holds on for a while. And the government? The government gives the best hugs.

A Taxonomy of Tax Hugs

Not all hugs are created equal, and neither are all taxes. Each type of tax is a different expression of governmental affection, calibrated for the occasion, the relationship, and the amount of money the government needs for things you’ll never see, understand, or benefit from directly but should feel grateful for anyway.

Income Tax: The Bear Hug

Income tax is the big one. The first hug of the year. The one that wraps around you before you even see your paycheck and says: “I love you, and I’m going to express that love by taking approximately 22 to 37 percent of everything you earned before you can touch it.”

It’s a bear hug — powerful, encompassing, and slightly difficult to breathe through. When you look at your pay stub and see the gross amount at the top and the net amount at the bottom, the difference between those two numbers is the hug. That’s the love. It’s quantifiable. You can measure how much the government loves you by how wide the gap is between what you earned and what you received. By that metric, some Americans are loved very much.

“I earned $85,000 last year,” said Gregory Withholding, a software engineer from Virginia. “I took home about $58,000. That means the government hugged $27,000 of my money. Twenty-seven thousand dollars of pure love. I can barely afford my rent, but emotionally, I’ve never felt so held.”

Sales Tax: The Friendly Squeeze

If income tax is the bear hug, sales tax is the friendly squeeze — that quick, warm gesture you get every time you buy something. A shirt. A coffee. A pack of gum. Each purchase comes with a little government squeeze that says: “I noticed you’re buying something. I love that. Here’s a small additional cost to prove it.”

Sales tax varies by state, which means the government’s affection is geographically uneven. In Oregon, where there is no sales tax, the government’s love is expressed through other means (property tax, mostly, which we’ll get to). In Tennessee, where sales tax can reach 9.75%, the government squeezes every transaction like it’s the last time it’ll ever see you.

“Every time I see that tax line on a receipt, I feel noticed,” said Karen Register of Nashville. “The government sees me. It sees my purchases. It knows I bought a $4 latte and it wants 39 cents of that latte’s value. Not for any specific reason. Just because it cares. That’s beautiful.”

Property Tax: The Long, Lingering Embrace

Property tax is the most intimate of the tax hugs. It’s not a quick squeeze or a one-time bear hug. It’s a long, lingering embrace that lasts for the entire duration of your homeownership — which is to say, forever, because property tax never ends.

You buy a house. You pay off the mortgage. You own the house outright. And then the government says: “That’s wonderful. We’re so happy for you. Now pay us $6,000 a year for the privilege of living in the thing you already own, or we’ll take it from you.”

That’s not a threat. That’s a commitment. The government is saying: “I will never let you go. Even after you’ve paid for your home in full, even after the bank is satisfied, even after every other financial obligation has been met — I will still be here, asking for money, every single year, until one of us ceases to exist.”

If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

“My grandmother paid off her house in 1987,” said realtor Sandra Escrow. “She has since paid more in property taxes than the house originally cost. She’s essentially bought the house twice — once for herself and once for the government. She says it’s like being in a long-term relationship where your partner occasionally reappraises your value and then charges you more. Which, now that I think about it, is exactly what it’s like.”

Estate Tax: The Hug Goodbye

And then there’s the estate tax — the most poignant of all tax hugs. The hug goodbye. The final embrace.

When you die, the government one last time wraps its arms around your assets and says: “You’re gone, but your money is still here, and I still love it. Let me hold it one more time.” Estate tax ensures that even in death, the government’s affection endures. Your children may inherit your home, your savings, your life’s work — but first, the government gets one last, long, loving squeeze.

Some people call the estate tax the “death tax” and consider it cruel. I call it “the government’s way of saying goodbye,” and I consider it tender. Think of it as a eulogy, except instead of words, it’s a bill. And instead of memories, it’s a percentage of your net worth. Same energy, though.

Where Do Your Tax Hugs Go?

A common question from people who haven’t yet learned to love taxation is: “Where does my money go?” This is a reasonable question, and the answer is both simple and profoundly moving.

Your tax dollars fund the following:

• Studies on the effectiveness of government funding — $4.2 billion annually. The government spends money to study whether spending money is effective. The studies consistently find that more studies are needed. This is called “due diligence” and it is the bureaucratic equivalent of a self-hug.

• Committees on committees — $890 million annually. As we’ve reported previously, the federal government operates numerous committees whose sole function is to create, manage, and contemplate other committees. Your taxes fund every chair in every room where every committee sits to discuss other committees. You’re welcome.

• The National Hug Administration — $12 million annually. Yes, this is real. Or at least, it should be. We couldn’t confirm its existence, but we also couldn’t confirm its nonexistence, which in government terms means it probably exists and has a budget.

• Regulatory compliance for the agencies that regulate regulatory compliance — $17 billion annually. This is the cost of making sure the regulators are regulated. It’s regulation all the way down. Like turtles, but more expensive and with worse posture.

• Printing money to pay for the cost of collecting taxes — an amount that the Congressional Budget Office describes as “non-trivial” and that independent analysts describe as “existentially absurd.” The government spends money to collect money, and the money it spends to collect money sometimes exceeds the money it collects, which means the government is, in certain cases, paying you to pay it. This is the financial equivalent of a hug that goes on so long it becomes awkward and then circles back around to being endearing.

• The remaining 62% — goes to defense, Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure, and other programs that are, frankly, less funny and therefore outside the scope of this article. But rest assured, those programs are also hugging your money, just in more conventional and less metaphorically interesting ways.

Why You Should Ask For More Hugs

Here is where I lose some of you. Here is where the fence-sitters fall off the fence and the skeptics cross their arms and the libertarians write an angry comment that begins with “Actually.”

But I’m going to say it anyway: you should want more taxes. You should ask for more taxes. You should go to your elected representatives and say: “Hug me harder. Take more of my money. I can barely afford groceries, but I can always afford love.”

Because here’s the thing about tax hugs: they compound. Every new tax is another arm around your wallet. And the more arms, the more love. Consider:

• Federal income tax — a hug
• State income tax — another hug
• Social Security tax — a side hug
• Medicare tax — a quick squeeze
• Sales tax — a pat on the back
• Property tax — a long embrace
• Capital gains tax — a hug for your ambition
• Excise tax — a hug for your vices
• Gas tax — a hug for your commute
• Hotel tax — a hug for your vacation
• Sin tax — a disapproving but still affectionate hug
• Alternative Minimum Tax — a hug that exists to make sure you didn’t avoid any of the other hugs

Add them all together and the average American is being hugged by the government from roughly 17 different directions simultaneously. That is an extraordinary amount of love. Some might call it “crushing.” I call it “thorough.”

“I calculated that approximately 48 cents of every dollar I earn goes to some form of tax,” said accountant Raymond Withholding (no relation to Gregory Withholding, though they do share a last name and a sense of resigned acceptance). “That means the government loves almost half of every dollar more than I do. And you know what? Maybe the government is right. Maybe it does love my money more than I do. It certainly spends more time with it.”

The Hug Fee

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that there is a cost associated with the government’s love. This is called the “compliance cost” — the money you spend figuring out how much money you owe. In other words, the hug fee.

Americans spend approximately $400 billion per year and 6.5 billion hours on tax compliance. That’s the cost of being hugged: hiring accountants, buying software, filling out forms, gathering receipts, maintaining records, and occasionally weeping over Schedule C. It’s the logistical overhead of love, and like all love, it requires effort.

Some people resent the hug fee. They say it’s absurd to spend money to calculate how much money you owe. But consider marriage: you spend money on the wedding, money on the ring, money on the venue, money on the flowers — all to formalize a relationship that, technically, exists regardless of whether you spend the money. Taxes are the same. The compliance cost is just the ceremony. The actual relationship is the part where the government takes your money forever.

“Tax Day is my Valentine’s Day,” I told my wife last April, as I sat surrounded by receipts, W-2s, and a half-empty bottle of wine. She looked at me with an expression I choose to interpret as admiration.

A Love Letter to the IRS

I’d like to close with a brief love letter to the Internal Revenue Service — the agency responsible for administering the federal government’s most comprehensive and enduring hug.

Dear IRS,

Thank you. Thank you for the forms. Thank you for the deadlines. Thank you for the penalties, which are just love expressed through financial consequences. Thank you for audits, which are just the government saying, “I want to know everything about you.”

Thank you for making the tax code 6,871 pages long, because a short tax code would mean the government doesn’t care enough to be complicated. Thank you for updating the code constantly, because a government that stays the same is a government that has stopped growing, and a government that has stopped growing has stopped loving.

And thank you for the refund. That beautiful, annual moment when the government returns a small portion of the money it took from me all year, and I feel grateful — grateful — to receive my own money back, as if it’s a gift. That is the most exquisite psychological mechanism ever devised. To take something, return a fraction of it, and make the person feel thankful? That’s not taxation. That’s genius. That’s love. That’s a hug so good you forget it was compulsory.

With all my remaining income,

Dr. Grant Funding

Dr. Grant Funding is Government Is Love’s Chief Financial Affection Correspondent. He has been audited three times and describes each experience as “intimate.” His tax returns are prepared by a CPA who has asked, repeatedly, to be removed from this article. The CPA’s request has been denied, pending review by the Request Denial Committee.