Posted on 04/13/2010 5:32:08 AM PDT by Kaslin
Income tax day, April 15, 2010, now divides Americans into two almost equal classes: those who pay for the services provided by government and the freeloaders. The percentage of Americans who will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009 has risen to 47 percent.
That isn't the worst of it. The bottom 40 percent not only pay no income tax, but the government sends them cash or benefits financed by the taxes dutifully paid by those who do pay income tax.
The outright cash handouts include the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which can amount to as much as $5,657 a year to low-income families. Other financial benefits can include child tax credits, welfare, food stamps, WIC (Women, Infants, Children), housing subsidies, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, S-CHIP and other programs.
This is both a massive transfer of wealth and a soak-the-rich racket. The top 10 percent pay 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.
Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has become the congressional leader in explaining details of the recently passed Health Control Law. He says that, based on Congressional Budget Office figures, taxes to pay for Obamacare will have to skyrocket to an 88 percent income tax rate within 30 years.
Although all wage-earners help fund their own Social Security and Medicare benefits, only federal income taxpayers pay the costs of running the federal government, and are responsible for paying off our $12.8 trillion national debt and for bailing out Social Security, Medicare, and Fannie and Freddie when they collapse.
Even the recently passed Health Control Law contains financial subsidies to unmarried couples that are denied to married couples. This rewards the unmarried women who were the second largest demographic constituency that voted for Barack Obama for president in 2008.
When Obama told Joe the Plumber he wanted to "spread the wealth around," Obama wasn't kidding. That's exactly what he is now doing: taking money from taxpayers and spreading it around to non-taxpayers.
Nor was Obama kidding when, on the eve of his election, he threatened, "We are going to fundamentally transform the United States of America." Converting the earnings of American workers into handouts for those who voted for Obama in 2008 is certainly a fundamental transformation.
Obama's promise not to raise taxes on middle-Americans is already down the drain. Obama brought former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker out of obscurity to serve as chairman of an Economic Recovery Advisory Board and announce that we need to raise taxes.
Volcker was blunt in predicting that the new tax increase will be a Value-Added Tax (VAT). That's the tax European socialists love because its rates can be hidden and frequently raised, while producing rivers of revenue for the bureaucrats.
Volcker claimed that a VAT is "not a toxic idea." It really is -- Charles Krauthammer called it "the ultimate cash cow" because it transfers so much money from individuals to the government.
Having already co-opted the executive and legislative branches of government for his fundamental transformation, Obama now wants to use the judiciary, too. The retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens gives him this opportunity.
On Jan. 18, 2001m on Public Radio WBEZ-FM, Chicago, Obama complained that the Earl Warren Court "wasn't that radical" because "it didn't break free from the essential constraints placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. ... The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and serve more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society."
Calling for the Supreme Court to participate in the "redistribution of wealth" is shockingly revolutionary. Any judicial nominee who agrees with Obama's theory should be rejected.
Obama's game plan to "fundamentally transform" America is based on both Saul Alinsky's modus operandi for community organizing and on the Cloward-Piven spending strategy. Saul Alinsky was a famous Chicago radical, and Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were less-well-known Columbia University sociologists.
The goal of all three of these agitators was the overthrow of the private enterprise system. The Alinsky strategy is to use community organizing and mass demonstrations by those he labeled the "Have Nots," and the Cloward-Piven strategy is to overload the bureaucracy with enormous demands for entitlements, thereby causing a financial crisis.
Obama used Alinsky methods by taxpayer financing of ACORN and subprime mortgages. Obama used Cloward-Piven methods by massive deficit spending for entitlements for more and more millions of people.
Fortunately, hardworking, taxpaying Americans are beginning to understand how they are being ripped off and rushed into bankruptcy. The one way to save ourselves and our country is to elect a Congress in November pledged to stop the spending.
Hillary Clinton could have equalled him, I think. She certainly would have done the healthcare initiative. And she's old SDS, like Bill, and did her undergraduate incense-burning before the altar of Saul Alinsky.
Now, whether she's as ruthlessly revolutionary as Obama, is another question. She's from suburban Chicago, someone once told me, but Obama's crowd are from the south side and lots tougher and rougher, and colder and bolder, and bla bla bla.
But she would be bad news all the same, and by this time she'd be in full stride with trying to get her consort Slick elected Secretary-General of the U.N. so she could sign over U.S. sovereignty to him -- and of course Slick's always worked for the Chinese, since before Charlie Trie showed up and opened a Chinese restaurant in Little Rock, coming all the way from Hong Kong to open that eatery just because Arkansas was so underserved with moo shoo pork.
So name your poison.
Whom we absolutely have to get to the polls so they can vote, too.
It isn't about gold, and it isn't about eggs, it's about the goose.
Obama really hates geese.
Just the way it is.
I think Hannity and others who are on the kick of "You don't pay taxes, you don't pay taxes" when it's just one of a million taxes not paid (federal income tax) are making a major mistake.
Actually two mistakes. One is that they needlessly PO people who pay those other taxes, just not federal income tax, and they needlessly play class warfare politics with the others ~ those who pay those other taxes AND federal income tax.
Rather than draw an invidious distinction between people on the basis of whether or not Uncle Sam is nailing them for one tax or the other, just go for tax reform.
Frankly, it's not at all my fault if Congress, or the state legislature, or the county government fails to tax me for something or other. I always favor NON TAXATION over TAXATION.
BTW, federal income taxes come in two flavors ~ individual and corporate. Please note that individual income taxes, where levied, are levied on people irrespective of their annual win/loss record, yet companies that don't make a profit are NOT TAXED.
Do you think it fair that only corporate losers get to evade income taxes when every individual, once he reaches a certain dollar value of receipts is taxed anyway?
Certainly the process should be horizontally equalitarian to some degree ~ that gains are taxed but not loses, or that maybe ALL earnings should be taxed irrespective of any loss.
Of course indirect taxation occurs. Confiscatory taxation on the most productive individuals trickles down to the tax freeloaders and tax welfare crowd. In the long run, confiscatory taxation may have a larger cost to society because it destroys incentives and creates artificial demand for government services.
However, I disagree with your assertion that dividing the country into tax groups is unfair or equivalent to class warfare used by the left. Almost half of the population is demanding (through their votes) substantial government services at the direct expense of the other half with most revenue provided by a small part of the tax paying crowd. This immoral, free-lunch policy threatens the economic foundation of the country by destroying incentives and creating demand for even more government services.
Your comment about corporate taxation is somewhat misleading. Corporate taxation falls on both consumers and owners of capital. Confiscatory corporate taxation reduces demand (higher prices) and profits. Double taxation of dividends also punishes owners of capital. Many corporations are privately held so corporate taxation is another form of individual taxation.
The creation of the "welfare crowd" as you call them is more a consequence of a failure to properly valuate the personal exemption than it is of indolence.
Tax systems are a poor way to arrange for cross-subsidization ~ whether that's to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, or to encourage business to hire people, or make products the politicians believe to be more necessary than others.
Congress, state legislatures and municipal councils have all the power to set budgets for public expenditures. Tax rates and methods should naturally follow from the those budetary needs.
Unfortunately in this country too many people think the "style of tax" is a more important consideration than the utility of the expenditures. Hence the argument that individual income taxes are the sine qua non of taxation ~ yet, for the unemployed college graduate still hitting the bricks two years after the destruction of the economy by Obama telling the San Fran Chron editorial board he was going to destroy the electric power industry in America ~ the promised transfer of wealth from the rich to him HAS NOT HAPPENED.
We've got several million young men like that ~ enough for a suitible army ~ and they have yet to get jobs from which they could be unemployed so they could reap the benefits of the vast subsidization presumably available.
Come to think of it, when you have a large number of unemployed, yet highly skilled and motivated young men, it's an awful lot easier to raise an army to "do something" than you might imagine. I would suppose that's happening as the gamers in momma's basement talk to each other about how uncaring the current regime is for their plight!
I'm not sure tax policy is a way to pry these guys away from their joy sticks to vote, but I think unemployment and joblessness is a way to get that AND MORE done! Did you realize we may not have until election day to get this stuff straightened out.
And God help Hannity ~ when a young man is unemployed, has no income at all, no welfare, no unemployment compensation, and is living on the suffrance of friendly relatives, for anyone to call him a leach for not paying taxes is the sort of insult that probably deserves a harsh penalty.
POs their parents too.
I think I'm going to see if I can start raising that army. Could be fun. Imagine, after all those centuries General Muawiyah kills Ali again! (Ali being a metaphor for the ancient regime who imagined that all would continue as it had in the past, with the same old leaders, same old principal familes, same old circles of inherited wealth and gosh were they sure surprised when Ali was gone).
Your points are well taken. I am a long ways from being a libertarian but there are some government workers who, while their jobs include valuable services, nevertheless will always vote for more taxes to sustain themselves. I exempted soldiers primarily on the idea that no tax-paid sinecure alone would be enough to encourage someone to remain in the military with the risks it entails. On the other hand, cops and firemen do valuable work but mostly it’s a few minutes of sheer terror punctuating hours of drudge and boredom. But I should not paint with such a broad brush, as you noted.
The problem is when a paycheck depends on tax income, and doesn’t involve too much risk, the people in that career are seldom, if ever, going to vote for lower taxes.
The tax structure matters. We have a federal income tax structure that encourages demand for government services while penalizing innovation and production. This tax structure is a recipe for long term disaster. I want to change the tax structure so that everyone directly pays for government services and the demand for government services is not artificially inflated by promises of a free lunch. I support elimination of all federal tax credits for individuals and lowering rates at the high end. Alternatively, a national sales tax would be a good substitute for an income tax.
As you indicate, the employment and general economic situation may bring change. I remain skeptical about the long term change. Government welfare programs are extremely difficult to change. The rats play the class warfare game well. It is difficult to compete with free services. I am not confident that voters will make the connection between tax structure, levels of government spending, and prosperity.
You forgot the Nobility in the House of Lords; The CongressCritters in the Senate and the House of Congress.
Baffled by Health Plan? So Are Some Lawmakers
WASHINGTON — It is often said that the new health care law will affect almost every American in some way. And, perhaps fittingly if unintentionally, no one may be more affected than members of Congress themselves.
Yes and I’m laughing at it. They Deserve some economic pain.
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