Your tax refund is a total scam that blinds us to Washingtons spending addiction

Another Tax Day — and amid the April procrastination and paperwork, an annual reminder of how disconnected we are from the true cost of government.For many Americans, filing taxes feels like a payday rather than a moment of reckoning.That’s because of a system we rarely question: automatic tax withholding.Withholding, created during World War II to fund the war effort, has made federal, state and local income-tax collection a seamless, nearly invisible process.But by requiring employers to automatically deduct taxes from employees’ earnings each pay period, withholding masks the burden of income taxes.What was once a deliberate act of handing over money to the government has become a core feature of the modern fiscal state, distorting how we understand our own personal finances.Roughly two-thirds of American taxpayers receive a federal refund each year, averaging about $3,000 apiece.But your refund is simply the US Treasury’s return of money you overpaid throughout the year — the result of a series of interest-free loans you unwittingly made to the federal government.It’s like having your wallet stolen, losing all your cash and credit cards, yet celebrating when you find your driver’s license within the empty wallet tossed in the bushes.Sure, it’s a modest win — but wouldn’t it have been better not to get mugged in the first place?Before withholding was introduced in 1943, Americans paid their previous year’s income taxes in a lump sum every April 15, or through installments over the following year.That made any tax increase immediately obvious — and painful.While small-government advocates often lament the 1913 ratification of the 16th Amendment, which authorized the modern income tax, the tax alone was not sufficient to unleash the modern federal fiscal project.It was automatic withholding that allowed the income tax to expand from a narrow levy on the wealthy to a mass tax on working Americans.And the tax-refund fiscal illusion cuts two...