Government employees aren't spending their own money. If you want to split hairs, we can say those employees spend "other entities money" instead of "other peo

Government employees aren't spending their own money. If you want to split hairs, we can say those employees spend "other entities money" instead of "other people's money", but the entire core of the points made remains. Similar problems of waste can happen with large corporations. (The smaller the company, the more likely such waste will actually impact your own paycheck, and the more market forces will make such waste painful.) "Taxpayer's money" is useful rhetorical shorthand to remind people that creating government money requires either increasing taxes (taking money from taxpayers), printing more money ("taxing" holders of the currency through inflation), etcetera. We have the notion of "for the people, by the people" - that the government should act in the interests of it's citizenry ("taxpayers", if sometimes quite indirectly), that the money should be spend wisely instead of wasted - both in the moral duty sense, and sometimes in the legal duty sense as well. Can you give an example of a legal and moral use of government funds that doesn't benefit taxpayers or citizens? The closest I can come up with is foreign aid and other outwardly focused actions, which still aim to "benefit" the local citizenry through warm and fuzzy feelings, better international relationships, better access to oil and foreign markets, etc...