We should be taking it easy, and the government should be using our tax money to help us, but they don't and they won't. See below.

Why the government won't help: The biological imperative impels government to attempt to grow in size and power. Government offers two justifications for this growth: the welfare state and the warfare state -- socialism and fascism. Both justifications are sometimes claimed at the same time. The Soviet Union was both deeply meddling in the private lives of its citizens and, at the same time, preparing for war, both of which were plausible excuses to appropriate wealth and freedom from its citizens. This was also true of the Lyndon Johnson presidency -- the Great Society and the Vietnam War. The same is true of the Bush II presidency -- social program expenditures and military expenditures are at their highest level ever (even adjusted for inflation).

Our Founding Fathers understood this tendency and tried to protect against it by creating a constitution which included a separation of powers, balance of powers, checks and balances, republican form (state's rights and a not-quite democratic senate) and Bill of Rights. But, from their beginnings, the federal govt. and its branches have struggled to overcome these impediments to power. In the Civil War, the Feds eliminated states' rights by making secession from the Union punishable by death; With the territorial conquests through 1916, the Feds created an imperialistic state. Commencing with the first non-territorial war (our 1917 entry into World War I), the Feds began building a national security state with the draft, income tax and Federal Reserve (which allows for deficit [war] financing). The national security state was furthered by our stage-managed entry into World War II -- the entrapment of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor -- through the lying Franklin D. Roosevelt. Successor presidents continued executive branch's covert tricks, mostly through the CIA, competing with the legislative branch for ascendancy, with the executive branch finally winning and congress being reduced to "little more than a debating society" (Jim Garrison). Thus the creation of the "imperial presidency".

Benjamin Franklin felt that it was only a matter of time until our constitutional government would degenerate into tyranny, and that all governments did.