My point is that if we can be taxed for merely living, then we can be taxed for everything we do while we are alive.
Under those circumstances, a Poll tax doesn’t seem so irrational.
I’m not advocating for them, I’m just comparing.
Question, if a baby is born alive and lives for only one day, what premium must the parents pay for the baby?
“We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat in our drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labors and in our amusements, for our callings and our creeds...our people.. must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live.. We have not time to think, no means of calling the mis-managers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow suffers. Our landholders, too...retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must...be contented with penury, obscurity and exile.. private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance.
This is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in it’s train wretchedness and oppression.”
Thomas Jefferson on Public Debt and Taxation
People do not even seem to understand how heavily we are taxed.
My own brother, a small businessman did not know what the TEA party stood for.
Taxed enough already!
Add up your taxes.
income tax
sales tax
property tax
school tax
state tax
local tax
vehicle registration
gas tax
tourist tax
tobacco tax
liquor tax
etc etc etc