Refining Our 'Theory' of Taxation (Is this really the way the Founders wanted it?)

American Thinker ^ | 03/26/2013 | Jon N. Hall

[SeekAndFind]

We Americans are taxed at just about every juncture in life that involves money. We are taxed when we earn our money and when we spend our money. We are even taxed when we give our money away, unless our gift recipient is a government-approved entity.

We are taxed when we don't realize we're being taxed, as in the hidden, embedded taxes built into the prices of the goods we buy, which pay for corporate income taxes. (You didn't think that corporations paid taxes, did you?)

In addition to all the taxes Americans are already paying, government continually enacts new types of taxes. For example, ObamaCare is loaded with new taxes. Given the proliferation of new taxes and the continuing cry from progressives to raise tax rates, Americans might consider why we tax what we tax. It's been said that if you want less of something, tax it. If that be so, then we need to be very clear about what it is that we tax, and how we justify taxing what we tax.

A new tax currently being promoted is the financial transaction tax, or FTT. Left-wing writer Katrina vanden Heuvel, who thinks the FTT is a swell idea, reports: "Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), along with Rep. Pete DeFazio (D-Ore.), unveiled a bill that would place a light tax on all financial transactions --- three pennies on every $100 traded." Vanden Heuvel thinks the FTT is irresistible: "an idea whose time has come."

But Andrew Morriss writes: "Studies by both the International Monetary Fund and a United Kingdom think-tank predict that most of an FTT would be passed on to consumers."

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Even a miniscule financial transaction tax would make computerized stock churning untenable.

That may be a good thing.

[SeminoleCounty]

Our Founding Fathers knew of only one way to raise revenue. TARIFFS

Yes..tariffs...on foreign goods

Of course....your average Liberal Free Trader Communist Globalist would squeal like a legitimately raped Sean Hannity at the inauguration of President Todd Akin if we reinstituted foreign tariffs.....but when we ran our government strictly on tariffs....we did not have income taxes, property taxes, death taxes, or the other extreme taxes we have today

Of course....this is why people like Barack Obama , Al Gore, the Clintons, George Soros, and many other liberals are big Free Traders....because all the ways you can remove wealth from people....which you cannot do with foreign goods tariffs

[MamaTexan]

Refining Our 'Theory' of Taxation (Is this really the way the Founders wanted it?)

Um.....NO!

Can a power, granted for one purpose, be transferred to another? If it can, where is the limitation in the constitution? Are not commerce and manufactures as distinct, as commerce and agriculture? If they are, how can a power to regulate one arise from a power to regulate the other? It is true, that commerce and manufactures are, or may be, intimately connected with each other. A regulation of one may injuriously or beneficially affect the other. But that is not the point in controversy. It is, whether congress has a right to regulate that, which is not committed to it, under a power, which is committed to it, simply because there is, or may be an intimate connexion between the powers. If this were admitted, the enumeration of the powers of congress would be wholly unnecessary and nugatory. Agriculture, colonies, capital, machinery, the wages of labour, the profits of stock, the rents of land, the punctual performance of contracts, and the diffusion of knowledge would all be within the scope of the power; for all of them bear an intimate relation to commerce. The result would be, that the powers of congress would embrace the widest extent of legislative functions, to the utter demolition of all constitutional boundaries between the state and national governments.
Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution