NJ Road Upgrades and "Your Taxes at Work"

I understand the need to pay taxes. I also understand the need to gripe about it, but more important;y, I do understand that we cannot live in a tax-free society. I get that. And as much as I may not care for how much comes out of my weekly pay cheque and where it goes (although I am more incensed about the distribution of the property tax), I know that there are a lot of things that couldn't/wouldn't have happened without those taxes.

I also know that we in the United States pay low taxes compared to other countries. I'm particularly fond of that.

However, as I was driving home from the ocean on Wednesday, I came upon road work. Well... it was road something, but I am reluctant to classify it as "work". Ever see road work signs in New Jersey? I don't mean the little orange signs telling that there is road work ahead in two miles; I mean the green signs that read what work is being done, amount of money being allocated to the work, estimated start and finish date, and some verbiage about your "tax dollars at work".

This is a misnomer.

Perhaps the word I'm looking for is "oxymoron", jamming two words together that make no sense. Some examples:

thunderous silence
military intelligence
intelligent design (always my favourite for sheer screaming stupidity)

You get the idea. Well, this was definitely the point where I thought about asking for my taxes back. If you are going to use them, at least use them wisely. At 1100 those guys should all be out there working their asses off. Instead, I located two men out of what should have been anywhere from 12 to 30 men, and those two weren't really doing anything. They were leaning on the hood of a pickup truck. There were no plans or drawings or paperwork of any kind on said hood. Just these two guys, leaning and looking at the area that clearly needs more work.

For this they shut down two lanes. For What? No one was doing anything! Not a thing! And those were just the two shining examples I saw, not the rest, who had the sense to lay low (literally) and not be viewed by the motorists as the not-working men they obviously were.

There are a lot of people who think they have some constituional right to not pay taxes. I disagree with that. Or, I should more accurately say, yes, you can decline to your taxes, so long as you understand and abide by the rules of doing such, which is to pay a penalty of some kind: whether it is paying your taxes back with a monetary penalty, jail time (which is a little silly, but whatever) or community service. But no government can run without some kind of regular income. And it is unreasonable to expect a good standard of living without putting into it.

Stop griping about paying taxes. Let's gripe about the wisdom of their use!