AHHH, the ridiculous non-fitting analogy poster.
If the federal government had no way of finding out what we earn then no-one would pay income taxes, then the IRA would assign us incomes like they do waitress tips. Wait to see how many ignore the Obama-care mandate.
But they do so your sarcastic comment is pointless.
My lib state has no way of knowing what I buy from businesses in other states. Too bad for them.
It was not an analogy. In Virginia, there is a line on the income tax form where they tell you to put the amount of “use tax” you owe. They have a couple of pages that explain the law, and tell you how to calculate what you owe.
You put some number there, either $0 or some other number, and it gets added up to a total.
Then you sign the tax form, where you are told that the signature indicates that you have truthfully filled in the form.
If you sign that form having put a number in that is not the truth, you “lie on your income tax form”.
Your suggestion that nobody would follow a law if they could not be caught is a sad commentary. If people ignore the Obamacare mandate it will be in part because the Supreme Court has told us it is not a “law”, and not a “mandate”, so you can legally decide to pay the tax instead of buying insurance.
BTW, I understand that people break the laws all the time. Even good people break laws all the time these days — but usually when the law seems so outrageous that it deserves to be broken (Obamacare would be an example of such a law, and maybe the law about drinking age, or maybe even marijuana use, depending on who you talk to).
But the argument you are making is not that sales tax is immoral, or absurd. If you were making that argument, you’d be suggesting how we could avoid paying the sales tax on all our purchases. I don’t know if you are arguing that the income tax is inherently unfair when you suggest “no-one” would pay it. Because self-employed people often pay the income tax they owe, even though there is a good chance the feds would never catch them. In fact, there are many ways to cheat on your income taxes that would be hard to catch, like overclaiming deductions, not reporting income that wasn’t reported separately, claiming tax credits you don’t deserve, and even more risky things like making up children and forging documents.
But most people actually do try to pay all the tax they owe, and try to use the political system to change the laws that they don’t like, rather than arguing that everybody has the right to disobey any law they don’t like or costs them money.
Christians are told they should submit to the government authority to the degree it does not compromise their walk with God. Is a sales tax a sin? I might think it is too high, but no, paying it does not make me a sinner (note that Jesus comment “render unto Caesar” does suggest that it is not a sin to pay a required tax to a government which will use the money for evil purposes, but obviously each person needs to come to their own decisions, I’m not going to tell you what your sins are).