Wealth & Money Quote by Andrew J. Bacevich

Bacevich isn’t railing against taxation so much as the ambiance of taxation: the creeping feeling that the bill arrives without an itemized receipt. The line works because it swaps the usual anti-tax vocabulary of burden and waste for a more intimate violation: “our pocket’s being picked.” That metaphor doesn’t just imply loss; it implies stealth, asymmetry, and contempt. You can disagree about the size of government, but nobody likes being treated like a mark.

The key phrase is “without our knowing what’s going on.” Bacevich is diagnosing a democratic failure before an economic one. The anger he’s naming is procedural: people can tolerate sacrifice when the terms are visible, debated, and connected to a legible public purpose. What corrodes consent is opacity - the sense that decisions are made elsewhere, by people fluent in acronyms and budget tricks, while ordinary citizens are asked to trust the process they can’t see.

Placed in Bacevich’s broader context as a military historian and critic of American overreach, the “pocket picking” often points beyond income tax toward the hidden financing of policy: deficit spending, off-budget war costs, and the habit of treating future taxpayers as a blank check. The subtext is that elites have learned to sell major projects - especially national security commitments - without pricing them honestly, because an upfront invoice would force an argument the public might actually win.

It’s a compact indictment of governance by fog: not “stop taxing me,” but “stop managing me.”