So... US History, I've got you:

Okay, in 1607 we started a colony in a place that would later be famous for having a lot of racists. For about a hundred years we were happy fucking over Native Americans, then people wanted to stop paying taxes, so we had a war with England. We won, with a lot of help from the French, but we don't give them much credit. We spent another 3/4 of a century fucking over Native Americans, building shit, and importing slaves, mostly from Africa. Then we had a Civil War about the slaves, killed each other a bunch, and in a huge surprise that no one saw coming, the part of the country that had all the industry won. We set the slaves free, so we could continue to treat them like crap. Then we went back to fucking over Native Americans, built a bunch of stuff (some of it was pretty cool), and started fucking around with the rest of the world. We started bringing in immigrants when things got shitty in other parts of the world, because we needed people to expand and someone else to be prejudiced against. We had some economic issues because some people wanted to be really rich, I'm sure taxes factored in there somewhere, but we pulled ourselves out of that with a couple of big wars and then we sorta took over half the world. We went to the moon, and appointed ourselves as "all around cool guys", although there were still a lot of issues with minorities and a big fracas about civil rights that some folks still haven't gotten over. But we thought we had to be tough guys to keep the USSR from making communism a thing, so we kinda ignored all that and started spending money on nukes and proxy wars instead of going to the moon. Rich people decided they didn't want to pay taxes again, and Reganomics mindfucked a generation of people into thinking you can run a country anywhere other than right into the fucking ground that way. After the Soviets made a mess of their half of the world and fucked off, we decided that things were too quiet and really started fucking stuff up in earnest. We pissed off a fresh batch of people in the middle east, because oil, and just kinda stirred the shit pot everywhere else because we were the biggest kid on the block. We also started the habit of surveilling everyone after some terrorists attacked us. Some of what we did might have been helpful, but there's so much chaos and so many pissed off people now it's hard to tell. Fast forward and some of us have figured out that we're causing problems, but we're neck deep in the sunk cost fallacy and busy letting people continue to promise us they can run the country better if rich folks pay less taxes.

TL;DR: It's taxes all the way down.