You do know that Friedman was one of the architects of the withholding tax?
(For which his wife never forgave him...)
Not his finest hour.
Nobody’s perfect and he regretted his contribution to that.
Listen ot the guy. He’s all over YouTube. Nobody talks about freedom and the Free Market Economy nor understands it like he does.
Would the Right would get a much better grasp of this stuff. The Right would be a much more formidable foe against the Left if they did.
Did not know that. And the withholding tax was implemented as I understand it during WWII, and was to have been eliminated once the war was over.
Have a memory of the LAST broadcast/commentary done by David Brinkley was a diatribe against the NEVER rescinded withholding tax— because the government had the money “up front” and it was too much of a good thing to give up. Will have to find the broadcast on this. Brinkley was derided by his own outgoing network about his “outdated ideas”. Seriously- this happened and was suppressed or written out.
Calvin— I found a source about Brinkley’s comments on withholding. It was in an article he wrote called “ America in the 1940’s” ( that gives the date as being Newsweek Jan 3, 1994,two years before he retired from This Week ABC- but I know he said it on this show or during the Repub convention in 1996) from this source:
https://humbledollar.com/2018/12/pay-as-you-go/
Quote from Newsweek, Brinkley:
“Was withholding the right way to help pay for a war? Among those who have weighed in are journalist David Brinkley (no) and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (yes).
In an article on America in the 1940s for the Jan. 3, 1994, issue of Newsweek, Brinkley recalled withholding’s introduction: “Under pressure of war, the withholding tax was born. It is doubtful that without war Congress would ever have voted for a tax so intrusive and troublesome. Because of the withholding tax, the term ‘take-home pay’ entered the language. Had people been forced to count out their taxes in hard cash for some government collector, taxes in such stratospheric amounts almost certainly could not have been collected.”
Brinkley continued: “The cost of the war was so high that the top rate eventually went to about 92%. It was explained to Roosevelt that his rich enemies would be soaked, even fleeced, beyond their deepest fears. They paid the 92%, hated it, but could not escape. It made Roosevelt so happy, Press Secretary Steve Early told me, that once or twice he saw the president spend hours poring over records sent to him from the IRS showing who paid how much.”
Congress was also delighted with the flood of money, writes Brinkley: “Even when the war was long over, there was never any thought of ending the withholding tax. (They held the top rate at about 70% for another 16 years.) Did the enormous tax rates pay the cost of the war? No. Did the government run the war on credit and leave billions in debt? Yes.”
This from old style Democrat Brinkley. Of course Doris K. Goodwin is a plagiarizing moron.
But NOTE— the crazy lefties, Sanders and the “Che-quita” ocasio-cortez.. are touting re-entering a 92% Rate of withhold! Imagine if we had NO withhold and people had to pay their taxes when due— in April, like small business owners— they’d pay attention then, wouldnt they?