Posted on 04/12/2011 6:17:19 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
So you have just finished preparing your income taxes, but did you understand the tax code? If you said yes, you do not know what you do not know. The U.S. tax code has become so long, complex, contradictory and devoid of common sense that no one can fully understand it - and this includes tax professionals and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) personnel. Can honorable persons of good conscience harass, fine and even imprison their fellow citizens for an alleged violation of laws and regulations they themselves do not completely know? But that is a topic for another column.
Tax economists have long argued that the U.S. income tax causes an enormous - and largely unnecessary - dead-weight loss to the economic system. The sheer cost and time burden of businesses and individuals trying to comply with the tax system - let alone the cost of the more than 100,000 bureaucrats at the IRS who claim to be administrating it - waste hundreds of billions of dollars. This waste of resources unnecessarily reduces economic growth and job creation. A major reason this obscenity persists is that few lawmakers and IRS rule makers think seriously about the consequences of what they have done and are doing, or just don’t care.
One person who does think seriously about tax and other financial issues, including the morality of the tax code, is California venture capitalist and financial scholar Kip Hagopian. Mr. Hagopian has a most timely and provocative article in the April-May issue of Policy Review (a publication of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University) titled “The Inequity of the Progressive Income Tax.” The U.S. has had a progressive income tax (in which rates rise at higher income levels) since the beginning of the income tax in 1913.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
It is very complicated. It is very confusing. It is very difficult and reminds me of the House of Doom. Dirth and Darkness. I remember when my dad could figure out his taxes in one morning, with one page of paper and pencil...
Welcome to tax slavery.
See tagline.
The real reason is that most lawmakers see the tax code as their private property to be rented to campaign contributors. Don't like the way your business is treated by the IRS? Just toss around a few tens of thousands of dollars to the right Congressmen and the law can be changed.
Burn the whole ugly mess to the ground and switch to either a flat tax or a single rate national sales tax.
There is a reason that it is long and complex.
Politicians derive their power from the
UNEQUAL application of the law.
A flat tax gives them no power to reward their friends and punish their enemies. A graduated tax with many loopholes gives them POWER.
I am literally a rocket scientist--and I have trouble wading through things.
Good post, SeekAndFind
Evidently, the complainers here do not possess the brainpower of a retired, former janitor turned two-week trainee at H&R Block who can figure it out for the average taxpayer. Let me suggest, there is much complaining around here and little effort to understand.
Let me add to your post that is your
MORAL DUTY
to NOT “feed the beast”.
The more money they have, the more power they have to take away your liberty.
“Burn the whole ugly mess to the ground and switch to either a flat tax or a single rate national sales tax.”
I agree, a flat tax on EVERYBODY would be the easiest to implement. I like the sales tax better, but the 16th amendment would have to be repealed first or the feds would surely have both an income and a sales tax.
To address our current economic problems we should bring before Congress a simple proposal:
Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
This states that Congress can take as much of our income as it wants whenever it wants. Sound like a good idea?
For those who do not recognize this proposal, it is the Sixteenth Amendment to our Constitution. In just short of one-hundred years, these thirty words have destroyed the Last Best Hope of Mankind on Earth.
We are a nation spiraling out of control to a future that none but a few drunk with power desire. There is but one hope to forestall this catastrophe, we must remove from Congress the Right-to-Robbery.
The pain and suffering will be tremendous but we shall survive. Continuing on our current path, these same hardships will result in the handing off to our children a failed state. And they will curse us for it.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan: There are simple answers, just not easy ones. Help champion Our Last Best Hope. Demand that we repeal the Sixteenth Amendment.
We will never again be a truly FREE people for so long as we continue to abide the communist inspired, class warfare inducing, income tax and the IRS!
I remember my grand father doing taxes for him and his wife and my mother on a three day weekend in early April. His taxes were for a small business and my mother's was for an employee. The first half of the vacation we stayed out of his hair while he did the taxes; the last half of the vacation he came out and joined us on the beach.
To gain that level of freedom today you have to pay for a professional and bring him tons of paperwork. Why?
Look at the recent “tax credit” explosion - taxes are being used to shape our behaviors, often against our own self interests, financial and otherwise.
PING!!!
It is a national disgrace. I am ashamed that the foundation of our representative democracy is a corrupt and corrupting pile of excrement.
You have to be kidding me. The highest paid accountants to the billionaires don’t understand it.
Turbo Tax is a small miracle.
Exactly
Baron M.A. Rothschild once stated: "Give me control over a nations currency, and I care not who makes its laws.”
I can do better: Give me the ability to control taxation of earnings generated in a currency and I care not who controls that currency or makes the laws.
Through hidden items in a tax code that is far too complex for any one person to have knowledge of in entirety, the number of items that can be inserted to choose the 'winners and losers' of business, life, and society is staggering.
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