Otherwise known as the April 15 tax deadline.
I consider taxation to be systematic and deliberate theft. My "say" in how much I'm forced to hand over to the government is laughably limited. I can:
Reamed and driven insane by over 300 pages of directions and regulations and exemptions and definitions and other bullshit. This is the result of a semi-organic process that hasn't been effectively checked since it's inception. It is the Porta-Potty that everyone uses to shit in and never gets cleaned out. Small distractions like Bush's tax cuts don't mean squat in the face of this out of control monster that destroys wealth, impairs production, and fuels the socialists on the Left and the Right.
I'd rather be without all the so-called benefits of taxation. I'd rather keep my money and spend it on the things I consider necessary and the things I merely want. I'd rather not have portions of my income and my investments diverted without my permission, and certainly not at all towards things that have absolutely no relevance to the limited government ideas embodied in the US Constitution. I'd rather Americans stop begging for the money taken from others and stand up and take responsibility for themselves. Pay for your own educations. Cover your own transportation costs. Find ways to finance your own healthcare needs. Take care of your own security arrangments.
Stop demanding that I have to sacrifice in order to support other life. You and I do not deserve to be ordered around. We are the slaves of no one as long as we understand slavery must be imposed - it isn't Man's natural state.
UPDATE(2:21pm)
I'm going to update this post with various articles and blogs that have something to say about the income tax.
Best & Worst Tax-and-Spenders in 2003, from Human Events Online.
Tax Day cartoons, from Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index on Slate. My favorites: Mike Thompson and Gary Brookins. This Mallard Filmore comic, posted by Kerry M. Kerstetter, is also good.
CATO: Tax Code Kills Civil Liberties, by Chris Edwards
Help may be on the way, however, with some congressional leaders planning to move ahead with reforms next year to replace the income tax with a low-rate consumption-based tax. That would go a long way toward reducing the following civil liberties abuses administered by the current tax regime:
Vertical Inequality
Horizontal Inequality
Complexity
Instability of Tax Law
Lack of Financial Privacy
Denial of Due Process
Shifting of the Burden of Proof
No Trial by Jury in Tax Court
Unreasonable Search and Seizure
Forced Self-Incrimination
Frustrated taxpayers dutifully completing their 1040s frequently ask themselves an understandable question: Where is all this money going? And they deserve an answer.The federal government is projected to spend $21,671 per household in 2004 - the most since World War II and $3,500 more than in 2001. Tax revenues will reach $16,981 per household through a combination of the income tax, payroll tax, gas tax, estate tax, and assorted business taxes typically passed on through higher prices and smaller investment returns. The remaining $4,690 represents the deficit per household.
Here is a breakdown of where that $21,671 goes:
Social Security and Medicare: $7,165
Defense: $4,240
Low-income programs: $3,479
Interest on the federal debt: $1,460
Federal employee retirement benefits: $835
Health research and regulation: $619
Education: $583
Veterans benefits: $565
Unemployment benefits: $451
Highways and mass transit: $400
Justice administration: $389
International affairs: $320
...the remaining $1,165 is allocated to all other federal programs
National Review: Oh What a Relief It Is, by John W. Snow
Americans have a healthy, historic distaste for the 15th of April - tax day. But tax day hurts less this year, for every American who pays taxes.Evidence of this came recently when the Tax Foundation calculated this year's "Tax Freedom Day" - the day on the calendar when Americans have earned enough to pay their taxes. This year, Tax Freedom Day was Sunday, April 11 - its earliest arrival in 37 years.
Because of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, this year's Tax Freedom Day was calculated to be April 11, the earliest in 37 years. The foundation employs a relatively simple formula that divides total tax receipts and total national income by the number of taxpayers, calculates the percentage of average income going to taxes, and figures out how many days it would take to pay that bill (assuming no other spending).The Tax Foundation calculates that the average American will pay 17.9 percent of income in federal taxes in 2004. But that finding is inaccurate because it fails to take into account the progressive nature of the U.S. tax system. Because a small percentage of wealthy Americans pay a disproportionately higher share of their income in taxes, their tax payments can exaggerate the average tax bill paid by middle-income families.
[...]
That amounts to a 22 percent exaggeration that would move Tax Freedom Day back about 11 days. And this is actually the smallest error the Tax Foundation has made in recent years.
When we struggle with taxes that come with our new prosperity -- call them "success taxes" -- we are struggling not with some peripheral tax pitfall but with the core principle of the code -- progressivity. Progressivity is a success tax, but it is also the mother of all taxes, the tax that dominates our lives like no other. Progressivity institutionalizes the class warfare that politicians tell us they are waging on our behalf.Yet progressivity is not an intuitive thing: As we look at our tax bills, we find we are forced to explain exactly how it works. Many of us simply fall back to assuming that progressivity is what makes rich people pay more taxes. That's not right. When the tax rate is 25 percent, a person who earns $100 pays $25. A person who earns $200 pays more. He pays $50. That's called a proportionate system, and it's not what we have.
On April 15, U.S. taxpayers will pay the last installment on their duty to government for 2003. The bill for federal, state, and local government totaled a staggering $3.3 trillion, of which one out of every seven dollars was in the form of "buy now, pay later" deficits, principally the federal one.Federal spending accounted for two thirds of the tax bill, nearly all of which was levied on incomes in the form of personal, corporate, and social-insurance income taxes. The remaining third, funding state and local spending, was raised primarily by indirect property and sales taxes, plus fees.
It is difficult to put this scale of government in perspective, since Gross National Product (GNP) accounting obfuscates both the size and the proportion of government spending. Using National Income, government takes $38 out of every $100 of income. Even this is misleading, however, because income thus defined includes unproductive transfer payments for welfare and social insurance. Corrected for this, government consumes $45 out of every $100 of productive national income.
About 140 million taxpayers will send tax returns to Uncle Sam this year, in a painful exercise involving 8 billion pages of paper that will help transfer about $1.8 trillion from the productive sector of the economy to government.[...]
Thanks to the capital gains tax, corporate income tax, personal income tax, and death tax, it is possible for a single dollar of income to be taxed four times.
[...]
The aggregate tax burden in America (including state and local taxes) is about 27 percent of GDP. This compares quite favorably to the tax burden in European Union nations, where taxes consume about 42 percent of national economic output. The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts improved U.S. competitiveness, but it is important to realize that the United States lags in certain areas. The United States, for instance, imposes the second-highest corporate tax rate of any developed nation. America even has higher corporate tax rates than socialist welfare states like France and Sweden.
Take a break as you fill out your 1040 form, and play this game: suppose you could choose which government entities your tax dollars support--and in what proportion. Since it's a thought experiment, let's assume that local and state government functions are part of the list. What percentages will you assign to which departments, agencies and programs?[...]
Let's expand the thought experiment. Say that those ignored boxes can advertise--but that the advertisements must meet the same standards of truthfulness as the advertisements for, say, antacids.
What a delicious prospect: a government office having to explain itself in order to persuade taxpayers to support its existence.
Bob Schulz announces this in late January to a rapt crowd of 200 gathered in an auditorium in Crystal City, Virginia. It's the first national conference of the We The People Foundation for Constitutional Education, a nonprofit advocacy group Schulz founded and runs.[...]
Yet when his kids begged him to reconsider the path that requires him to declare publicly that he won't go to jail, his wife Judy told them, "Your father put his country before his family, and I support him."
Schulz has stopped paying federal income tax, and he isn't afraid to let anyone, including the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), know it. Not only is he not paying, but he's also leading a national movement telling everyone else they shouldn't pay either.
I am a member of the richest 5%. I am, by most standards, rich. I make a second year attorney's salary at a big Chicago law firm, and my wife makes a pretty good salary as a public interest attorney. We just bought a nice house in an expensive neighborhood around the block from Wrigley Field. We have a new car. We have a lot of fun gadgets (TiVo, iPods, and some other gadgets with goofy capitalization). We eat out pretty much whenever we want. Life is comfortable.But we worked hard for our comforts. We went to college and went to graduate school. We took out loans. We studied hard for the bar exam. We go in early and come home late. We work on weekends.
So this weekend I figured out our taxes, and discovered that we are too rich for everything. Despite paying several thousand dollars in student loan interest, our gross income level knocked us out of any kind of deduction for it. Ditto for elections to our 401(k) plans. We got the standard deduction (no mortgage interest because we moved this year), exemptions for ourselves, and that was it. The end result is that we paid close to a quarter of our income to the federal government (close to a third of our income when you count social security and medicare taxes).
Again, I am not starving or in risk of going bankrupt. But we do have a kid on the way, we have a mortgage, and we have big student loans. We're not filling up with premium or buying 700 threadcount sheets. So when I hear politicians talk about helping the "ordinary Americans," and "taking America back for hard-working middle class Americans," it pisses me off.
UPDATE(4:02pm)
Then there's the problem capitalists present to themselves: Do free markets ease the pain of taxation?
UPDATE(5/20/2004 1:13pm)
I've just discovered the perfect term for the economic reasoning behind taxing incomes: Pagare Tutti, Pagare Meno.
UPDATE 10/8/2004 2:04pm
Even libertarians get confused on this: Tax cuts do not "put money" in our pockets.
UPDATED 4/15/2005 11:00am
Tax Day, 2005
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