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So what will my effective tax rate be now? 50%?

We must . . . End Tax Slavery Now; Nov '97
by Jarret B. Wollstein

HOW MUCH DO YOU REALLY PAY?
     According to the Tax Foundation, in 1994 the average American paid 22.4% of his or her income in federal taxes, plus 11.8% in state and local taxes - 34.2% total.
     But that's just the beginning! Dr. James Payne of the University of California found that in addition to direct taxes we also pay huge, hidden taxes including:

Compliance costs - record keeping, monies spent on tax planning, computers and software purchased to fulfill IRS requirements, etc.
Enforcement costs - IRS audits, field investigations, service center corrections, criminal investigations, litigation, and forced collections.
Emotional, moral and cultural costs - families forced onto welfare, time and creative energy lost figuring out how to avoid taxes, etc.

     For every $1 we pay in direct taxes, we spend an additional $0.65 in compliance costs. And even that figure doesn't include the cost of import duties, license fees and other government regulations. For a typical U.S. family, the real cost of taxes and regulations is at least:
Federal taxes              22.4% of income
State & local taxes      11.8%
Compliance costs        22.2%
Regulatory costs         12.7%
70.1% of your income is now consumed by government

The issue in tax reform is not the rate, it is how we are being taxed. How much is a separate issue to be addressed by reducing government to begin with.

Patrick Henry, Virginia Ratifying Convention June 12, 1788:

"the oppression arising from taxation, is not from the amount but, from the mode -- a thorough acquaintance with the condition of the people, is necessary to a just distribution of taxes. The whole wisdom of the science of Government, with respect to taxation, consists in selecting the mode of collection which will best accommodate to the convenience of the people."

This is what we have now, and what the NRST repeals and corrects:

"As a matter of fact, what the income tax does — and this is the debate that I think we always try to get into in order to let you and him fight, see — and the people of this country are led down a path where the actual control of their resources, which in the end is the control over their will, is handed off to the government."

. . .

"The government then manipulates that will in order to destroy the freedom of our electoral system through the income tax structure, and we call the resulting slavery a free system."

"In point of fact, it is not as the founders understood, and the only way to restore real freedom is to give people back control over the income that they earn so that they won‘t, at the voting booth and in other phony issues, be subject to that manipulation."

- KEYES TRANSCRIPT (01/28/02)

"A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man's business; the eye of the federal inspector will be in every man's counting house....The law will of necessity have inquisical features, it will provide penalties, it will create complicated machinery. Under it men will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the tax payer. An army of federal inspectors, spies, and detectives will descend upon the state."
-- Virginian House Speaker Richard E. Byrd, 1910, predicting the consequences of an income tax.