One of my friends just brought an interesting article to my attention. It’s a Wall Street Journal opinion piece written by Ari Fleischer (former White House Press Secretary) entitled “The Taxpaying Minority.” From the title you can guess he states the usual stats: top 40% of the population pays 99% of taxes, top 10% pay 71%, and the bottom 40% pay…NOTHING!
With the Earned Income Tax Credit many of these patriots even receive handouts by the federal government, taken from the rest of the chumps who pay taxes. When a large percentage of the population has no vested interest in the fiscal solvency of the state, they are prone to demand increasingly irresponsible programs until a crisis forces change. The Romans called the crisis ”civil war” after which a dictatorship was established.
“If, as now happens, 60% of the people in our democracy can force 40% to pay the bills, what’s to stop 65% from making 35% pay it all? Since no one wants to pay taxes, what’s to stop 90% of people in a democracy from making 10% pay it all? Or why not let 99% of the country off the hook, as long as the remaining 1% picks up the tab?”
This is the inevitable consequence of inadequately constrained democracy, as illustrated by the British historian, Alexander Tytler, in his lifecycle of civilizations. ”A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”
It’s a tried and true axiom of reality/economics that when something is free it loses value, i.e. if you get free health care you are less circumspect in your consumption of those resources. My friend’s father runs a manufacturing plant that had an odd thing happen…when the company decided to give free health care to its employees, there was a sharp increase in people taking sick days and heading to the doctor. Crazy, right? Can you guess the solution? Not many people liked him, but when my friend’s father introduced a nominal co-pay there was a drastic reduction in the number of people getting sick. If only all diseases could be so easily cured!
When a large percentage of the country’s citizens get away without contributing anything to funding our government, they have little stake in how it is run. They care only for what they can get out of the system, without any thought to the consequences of how these free goodies are delivered. You can see the apathy everywhere! Voting is a joke. How can you take a system seriously when something as preposterous as our current income tax system is so entrenched that far superior alternatives like the Fair Tax are considered impossible to enact?
I hope America can get its act together and fix one of the only safeguards to ensuring our Democracy doesn’t devolve into apathetic, dependent, serfdom. The rich should pay more taxes since they derive greater benefit from government, but the middle class and poor also derive benefits for which they must pay their proportionate share. Pandering to these majority voting blocks by promising to stick it to the rich even more sounds great from a podium, but has only one inevitable outcome.
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America will fail because of Paying taxes we should not be paying for. This country was founded on not wanting to pay tax to a King (Refer to England in the 17 Century) Refer also to the forefathers that came here to avoid the King’s Tax. They protesed because he even wanted to tax everyting here. Now we are faces with paying tax practically for everything even when you receive a gift. A newborn has to pay $17 Dollars to be born. Decmebe 16 1773 The Boston Tea Party. Now that was something. People were fed up with paying taxes. Something has to be done, or a person won’t be able to make an honest days wages without money being taken from them.
Off topic, but instead of paying these idiotic top companies BILLIONS of dollars in stimulus money, our Government should have given each actual TAXPAYER $1Million. That would have cost roughly $150Million compared to $400BILLION in the so-called “Government Bailout (Failout)”. Look at the savings and what a way to restart the economy. The big reason, Americans could actually payoff their debts, keep their homes, buy American made cars, and reinvest in our stock market. Forget the $100Million Bonuses given to unproductive financial idiots.
Yes, evrybody needs to pay taxes in the U.S. in order for it to work.
@Phillip Johnson – I hate the idea of giving handouts to everyone, since ultimately that comes down to thugs taking from some and giving to others. That’s not right.
But in this scenario I have to agree that it’d be far better to hand each taxpayer a direct subsidy rather than dole the same money out to companies that made gross errors.
Regular Americans are hurting big time and the ponzi scheme that is our financial system continues to plunder. We’re creating a country of serfs destined to work way too many hours for way too little in exchange. A wannabe dictator could not have organized a better control system on a population than we now have in America, in which most people are so saddled with debt, and unable to ever pay it off since about 60% of their incomes are confiscated through various forms of taxation.
The best thing for Americans to do is default on their debts, refuse to worship to the FICO gods, and conduct most of their business through barter and black market operations. Sad to say, but this is the sad state to which America has devolved…
@Ronald Baro – I couldn’t agree more! Most Americans would be shocked to learn they lose about 60% of their incomes to taxation. We overthrew the British for attempting to levy a fraction of that. When will modern American sheeple awake?