Posted on 10/10/2016 7:27:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
Almost every penny left in the grubby hands of federal officials is squandered, wasted, misused or misallocated. Every penny kept from the federal behemoth is private property conserved and saved.
One of Donald Trump’s virtues is that he appears smart enough to instinctively know what I just said. It benefits business and everyone else if as much private property remains in private hands, so that it’s put to the best use possible.
I’m talking Trump taxes.
It’s alleged that over two decades, Trump had the good sense to pay almost no taxes by declaring close on a billion dollars in losses, before 1995. This, at least, is my understanding of this particular trumped-up case against the candidate.
At the risk of offending the crass utilitarians who make up the liberal commentariat, I’ll talk natural rights.
It has become anathema to float the outrageous idea that a man owns the proceeds from his labor, completely, and that whatever government takes from him or her amounts to private property stolen.
It’s considered an equal outrage to so much as suggest that your prime real estate is your body. And that what you do to sustain your corporeal self—the money you make—is an extension of your body and 100 percent yours.
Certainly from the fact that the state skims 30 percent or 45 percent, or some random sum, from your pay—it does not follow that this law is preordained by a higher power.
Neither does it follow that, by virtue of being decided by 535-odd clowns in the Lower and Upper Houses, property confiscated by force—taxation—is sanctioned by the same higher power.
You may also wish to consider that the US government no longer pays for its obligations, but continues to borrow against the future earnings of its people. What is not borrowed by government or counterfeited by the Federal Reserve is confiscated from individual Americans via taxation.
So preventing a thief and counterfeiter from seizing funds that’ll be further misused and misspent is a laudable thing. Moreover, what the state takes from you is fungible—in other words, the government can put your money to use as it sees fit, not as you see fit. It can meddle all over the world, sponsor the importation of refugees who may kill Americans and consume resources you’d rather see spent on America’s own displaced and destitute.
While I’m making mischief, in the context of self-ownership, consider the following:
Liberals insist a woman owns her body. That’s what undergirds their insistence that she may eliminate fetal tissue from within her body.
But if ownership of their bodies is the ethical basis upon which women can choose to abort their babies; why can’t a man or a woman, for that matter—both of whom presumably own their bodies—keep private property accrued through the use of that same body’s labor and smarts?
I mean, is your body—your mind, soul and corporeal self—yours only when it suits liberals? Is your body your own only for the purpose of killing what’s in it, but never for the purpose of keeping what it creates?
Trump is accused of not parting with enough of his private property, taxes, which he was supposed to hand over to a shakedown agency; to what is essentially an engorged, voracious organ called government.
But put it this way: Whatever Trump did with his funds is better than what the government would have done with them.
Private property in the hands of its rightful owner is always better utilized than in the possession of centrally-managed, politically-driven systems. The perennial misallocation of funds in such centrally-managed systems is inescapable, because there is no private property in a government system.
“Oh, we’ll reform government,” conservative and liberal politicians keep promising. They lie. If they claim to be able to run the state apparatus as they would their own privately owned businesses, they lie.
Why? In a government system the concept of scarcity doesn’t exist. Why do scarcity and conservation not exist in government-run departments and systems? Not because the people are necessarily bad, but because the incentives motivating them are inverted and perverse.
Again: The imperatives associated with private property are not in operation in government.
Government misuses your taxes, or Trump’s taxes, because once in the government’s coffers, that money belongs to nobody. It’s held collectively, not privately. Government will forever end up misusing, misallocating, squandering or wasting resources, because this is money held communally, not privately.
Money that is not yours, and comes easily, by simply pointing a gun at someone and saying, “Your Money or Your Life,” à la the IRS; money you’ve not worked to earn—this money will never be put toward its most productive use, but will generally go towards shaping production and society in politically pleasing ways.
You can’t reform government no matter how hard you try. You can only minimize it, or cut it so that it “can be drowned in the bathtub,” to paraphrase Grover Norquist.
The accepted piety is that it’s patriotic to pay taxes. Quite the opposite. Be glad that Donald Trump withheld taxes, because that’s money not spent aborting babies, killing people (ours and others) in faraway lands, overpaying them here at home, affirmatively hiring dead wood, and generally growing the oink sector.
Every American who pays taxes from Trump to us, is allowed to take every legal deduction that is applicable to avoid overpaying their taxes.
Even the Free Turbo Tax on line program looks for every legal tax break/deduction any American can use.
PERSONALIZED TO YOU!
We ask questions to get to know you. Then, we’ll search for every tax break that applies to you.
https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-edition.jsp
The difference is he earns his money and she steals it
Trump’s “genius tax move” was actually something is routine. I’ve done it myself, though it was for 7k not 956M.
For business returns, you add up income and subtract expenses. If you’re negative, you handle it accordingly, depending on the corporate structure.
You can roll losses into your personal return as long as the business activity is not a passive activity on your part.
To me, the real issue with the tax release is “Who released these?”
I suspect it was a state employee. There should be computer access records showing when returns are accessed and by whom. This is how the authorities need to address privacy suits.
The bible states that taxes have a valid role that rises above “stealing.”
However the mission creep of modern government (more like mission hasty run even, than creep) has brought it well into the realm of stealing.
Trying to subsume charity into government is a particularly bad idea. This produces sinecures that pat themselves and each other on the back, and cynical political motives. There is no inherent motive to do what such agencies as Salvation Army do, which is optimize the efficiency of efforts (they call it “Doing the most good”).
All of us with half a brain, take advantage of every legal tax deduction that is available to us.
There is nothing that is criminal, when we obey the tax laws and get a legal deduction.
The tax deduction system is, in the large view, a system of averaging. Gains are averaged against losses. Even the art of taxation itself has been described secularly as “getting the most feathers from the goose with the least hissing.”
The view that folks like Hillary is setting up as “fairness” is an artificial view. Almost as long as there has been taxation there has been averaging.
Excellent.
Nobody has shown yet, for certain, that Trump actually did avoid paying taxes for more than one year, a year in which he reportedly made 2/3 of the Net Operating Loss back. Yet liberals are still insisting he didn’t pay taxes for 20 years, Hillary said it last night.
I challenge anyone, find me one person who DOES NOT pay as little in taxes as possible. One. Multi millionaire or not. Just one. Oh yeah, I pay as much taxes as I can. Have you ever heard ANYONE say that?
I still have issues with every tax proposal out there, including Trump’s. I see no reason whatsoever a person who makes a 7 figure income or more should pay more taxes, by PERCENTAGE, than the person who barely clears $20,000. If you or I pay 15%, the 7 or 8 figure income guy should pay the same. The dollar amount will be bigger, but the percentage of his or her income will be the same. In other words, FAIR.
Then eliminate the loopholes, tax shelters and excessive write offs, (note I said excessive, not all) and you have a tax system that would allow the government to take in more revenue with a net reduction of individual contributions.
Then eliminate the frivolous spending, like a lot of the insane “research” programs, and it would be a much better system. Why in the world do we need to spend several hundred thousand dollars to put a shrimp on a damn treadmill? Who cares if monkeys can type if they’re drunk? (made that one up but I’d bet they wold pay for it)
Trump does say he wants to eliminate a lot of the loopholes, good luck getting it through Congress, but if he still wants the rich to pay a higher percentage than anyone else, it’s still not a fair tax code.
I don’t have an issue with people like Trump trying to pay as little taxes as they can, I have an issue with huge multi national corporations using every loophole and tax shelter they can to pay little or none.
For example, a story I saw a while back said that Google had transferred 80% of their profits to a shell corporation in Bolivia, where they pay no corporate taxes, and after the other loopholes and write offs, they ended up paying a 3.5% tax rate. Only corporations with that kind of income can take advantage of this scenario, to cheat this country out of boatloads of money.
I realize the corporate tax rate does need to be lowered, it’s causing them to leave entirely. But they also need to be paying their fair share, which is the same as everyone else pays. Or for corporations, maybe 5% more...maybe. Any higher and I wouldn’t like it. But shut down the tax evasion schemes they are using now.
It’s not the taxes, it’s the spending.
If spending isn’t cut, the money will come from taxes and debt. The ratio is less important than cutting the spending in the first place.
Trump for President.
I almost wish Trump would say “I use tax laws to keep the Feds from having anymore of my money because that way I can hire more people....and the FEDS have an abysmal record OF spending OUR TAX DOLLARS.”
If you do not pay any taxes and rely on taxpayers to support you, you are offended if they follow the law and also do not pay taxes.
In addition Trump proved why America is America. After losing 1 billion he came back and made 10 billion. That, and freedom just to be is why so many want to come here in the first place. Not all, but many.
A graduated income tax is one of the main tenets of Marxism
Trump did not AVOID paying taxes. He took advantage of the tax laws of the United States. He didn’t “AVOID” anything.
I didn’t avoid paying taxes, I didn’t OWE any tax.
Trump needs to call them on this! Ask these moron moderators if they took any tax deductions on their returns?
Sure the numbers associated with my taxes are a lot bigger than yours, I’m a billionaire.
Hillary keeps talking about “Fact Checkers”, as far as my taxes are concerned, I have the BEST “Fact Checkers” in the business, the IRS. They are fact Checking my returns right now. When they are done fact checking them, I will release them.
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