"Once!"
Posted on 03/17/2013 3:17:20 PM PDT by Lorianne
You are correct. But let me take a stab at why this is causing so much heartburn.
"Most" taxes collected in the US are hidden in some other form of payment.
Road use taxes are hidden in the price of gasoline and collected by the retailer. Income taxes are withheld from your paycheck, collected by your employer, and then remitted to the government. Property taxes are folded into your monthly mortgage payment, and remitted by the lender.
Very few taxes that we pay are plainly labeled as such. The government has succeeded in making others their collector and enforcer.
Except this time with the Cyprus deal, it is naked, and out front. That's why folks are upset. It would be the same thing here if withholding were abolished and people had to write a check monthly or quarterly payable to government.
QE 1,2,3,4,5,6 ...... is also a tax but a stealth one.
At least the income tax and payroll tax is more straightforward pre-arranged theft. This thing in Cyprus is more like an ambush ... like getting jumped at the ATM machine.
Hmmm...didn't John Roberts redefine ZeroCare as a tax? Evidently, whenever government needs to violate a law that would send anyone of us who did it to jail, all they have to do is say it is a tax. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Maybe. But I think the backlash will make it “once.”
That seems to be the common response. “I’m only outraged because it’s obvious.”
Don't kid yourself, this is a very dangerous precedent which will be cited in order to legitimize the next government excursion into your wallet.
Old news. If you have kept a savings account the last few years, you have already taken a larger haircut on your savings.
"Once!"
That’s tragicomic. Tragic that we’re ok with rape after dinner, comic in the two-faced nature of it.
The suddenness of it might also be a factor. We know most taxes are going to be there. The exact amount might be a shock, but we know they’re coming. This one sounds like it was foisted on the unexpectedly.
The last couple of years the Fed has literally printed electronic money to give to the politicians. In exchange the Fed has collected worthless paper (Treasuries) which it will never sell, so the printed money is inflationary. Therefore the politicians have already taken that excursion. If you have a savings account you have already lost more than the Cypriots just did.
Haha. How do you remember that?
The = them. My keyboard sometimes sticks.
As I understand it, the tax is Germany’s condition for bailing out the Cypriot banks. What happens to depositors’ money if the banks aren’t bailed out?
But it also shows how effective the artifice of "withholding" (known as pay-as-you-go when first adopted in 1943) has been in extracting money from the citizenry without a lot of squawking.
Great comments by Karl Denninger at http://market-ticker.org/ .
Yep. You are correct.
I don’t think so. I think this is an EU strategy for moving capital out of Cyprus to stronger EU safe havens. And it is working. OTOH the US has no interest in chasing investments out of the US.
Wrong President. But I don’t doubt Obama would say this in our case too.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.