Out of Sight, Out of Mind

I couldn’t agree more with this article on how the withholding tax has allowed the government to get away with its massive growth. It’s why most people don’t understand how much they are really paying in income taxes.

If everyone had to write actual checks for their taxes, rather than have it held back from their paychecks, they would become much more interested in seeing taxes reduced. I also like the idea to make tax payment day the same as election day so that people can better make the connection between the two events.

KMK

Anti-Tax Message Resonates With Voters

I do relish the opportunity to point out the few bits of good news that occasionally appear. As some of you may know, there has been a big fight over the past several months in one of the states that doesn’t have an income tax, Tennessee, to start taxing all kinds of income. There have been near riots at some of the rallies involving this issue.

Last Thursday, TN had its primary election. While the issue of implementing an income tax was not explicitly on the ballot, it was implied in many of the candidates’ platforms. The excellent news is that many of the incumbents and candidates who have been advocating the income tax were defeated.

I have always wondered why more candidates haven’t used an aggressive tax cut as a main rallying point. Mr. Viagra’s (Bob Dole) impotent 1996 campaign promise to cut everyone’s taxes by a whopping fifteen percent doesn’t qualify.

As a point of accuracy, I do want to clarify the true income tax status of TN. While almost all kinds of income are not subject to a State income tax, there is a six percent tax on interest & dividend income above $1,250 per person ($2,500 per married couple) per year.

KMK

How Should Tax Dollars Be Spent?

Back during the VietNam War, one way that Joan Baez & her fellow war protestors used to fight the US military was to withhold from their taxes the percentage that they believed was used for what they considered to be immoral warfare. Some of them supposedly deposited the money into escrow accounts or donated it to charity. Most of them probably used the money to buy more LSD or pot. Their approach was illegal then and IRS continued to exercise its awesome powers to make sure all taxes were paid.

According to this story in the NY Times, current opponents of the US defending itself against terrorists are resurrecting this idea and are advocating that people hold back the 50 percent of their taxes that they claim is used by the military. This entire concept is so wrong for so many reasons, that I will limit my discussion to just a few.

First is the issue of whether or not the Federal government should be spending money on military actions. As a Libertarian, I have always believed that the Federal government should limit its actions to just those few areas as designated in the U.S. Constitution, which includes the defense of this country’s borders and its people. If we Libertarians had our way, no Federal tax dollars would be spent on anything not authorized in the Constitution.

The very sad fact of life is that most of what our Federal tax dollars are used for is well beyond anything that our founding fathers envisioned being handled by the Federal government. Many of us truly believe that if our rulers in DC would spend more time and energy on defense matters and less on the unconstitutional issues that dominate their agendas, we may not have been attacked last September and wouldn’t currently be twiddling our thumbs waiting for the next attacks.

Which brings us to the next issue. Do we Libertarians, and anyone else who similarly respects the Constitution, have a legal or moral right to withhold tax payments for those things that we don’t believe are properly within the scope of the Federal government? While I wish such were the case, that just isn’t proper.

Contrary to the ignoramuses who say that the United States is a Democracy, it is in actuality a Representative Republic. We (those of us who vote) select people to go to Washington to decide how our tax dollars are spent. While very attractive in concept, if every person had the right to decide where each of his/her tax dollars goes, we would have an even more chaotic mess than we have with our 535 elected rulers making those decisions for us. The answer, for those who don’t agree with how the Federal government spends our money, is to elect those people who share our views on what the Federal government should be doing and how tax dollars should be spent.

KMK

Class Warfare

Here’s a good explanation of how the JackAss Party [referred to as the National Socialist Democrat Party (NSDP)] relies on class envy and attacks on the wealthy as its core philosophy. By their definition, as well as their allies in the media, anything that is good for the evil rich is automatically bad.

Is it true that when Democrats recite the pledge of allegiance, they say “one nation under Marx?” I’m sure their patron saint (Karl Marx) is so proud of what they have been able to accomplish in the United States. Their platform is almost a perfect match for his Communist Manifesto.

KMK

Maybe There’s Hope

Some optimistic political news from the Left Coast, in the PRC (People’s Republic of California). Democrats assumed that everyone shares their love of high taxes and expensive government programs. When they ran some ads attacking their Republican opponents for favoring lower taxes and cuts in government programs that can’t be afforded, the public support for the GOP candidates increased. Amazing. Let’s see more of this around the country.

KMK

Taxachussetts

The rulers in the cradle of our country’s liberty, Massachusetts, have the same disdain for the wishes of the lowly peons as the rulers of Arkansas have. They do everything possible to prevent the people from voting on tax issues.

KMK

Spitting Against the Wind

As it is in every State, here in Arkansas it is an extremely difficult & practically impossible task to reduce any kind of taxes. The full power & force of the government is utilized to stymie any attempts by the peons to in any way limit the amount of money that is sent in to fill the troughs of our rulers. I have only been living here for nine years; but I have already seen several attempts to remove property taxes met with a slew of dirty tricks by government employees and officials. They are so scared of allowing the people to vote on any tax reduction issue that they pull out all stops to prevent any such issue from appearing on a ballot.

The latest attempt to reduce taxes in Arkansas is an effort spearheaded by some fellow Arkansas Libertarians to have the sales tax removed from food and medicine. Rather than just benefiting the evil rich landowners, as a property tax repeal was portrayed, this would save everyone money. This effort is even endorsed by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the first time I have seen a newspaper in this state side with less taxes. Who could possibly be opposed to such an issue of fairness as not taxing the necessities of life (food & medicine)?

Government officials are scared to death to allow this to show up on the ballot and have gone through the petitions and tossed out several signatures based on technicalities that are never used to scrutinize ballot initiatives to raise taxes or increase the size of government. Luckily, the Axe The Food Tax group has until August 30 to acquire replacements for the signatures that the Secretary of State tossed out.

You can check out more info on this measure, and find out where to sign the petition at the group’s web-site: www.FoodTax.org

KMK

No Sales Tax

Although sales tax is really a small percentage of the total price paid for an item, areas such as Texas, are able to generate a lot of sales activity by having tax free days. It again makes my point that anyone who says that raising or lowering taxes doesn’t influence behavior (static analysis) is an idiot.

KMK

Government Accounting Standards

With the media and our rulers in DC piling on the story of creative accounting in the private corporate sector, it is important to put it into perspective. No corporation has been doing anything even closely approaching the insane accounting that has been routinely done by the people who control our lives in DC. Likewise, no corporation can possibly affect nearly as many people as the Imperial Federal Government does.

FoxNews has another good piece with some examples of how corrupt and incompetent the accountants are in DC, who handle trillions of dollars of our money every year. How soon do you think it will be before any of those responsible for these accounting frauds are paraded before the cameras in handcuffs, as are corporate executives? How about never? In fact, instead of prison time, which would be the fate of anyone in the private sector doing what our rulers do every day, our masters in DC will continue to receive raises and be re-elected forever.

KMK