Monday, July 2, 2007

Taxation Without Truth

Current taxation by the U.S. Government is a travesty. Its purpose is to keep citizens in the dark about obscene fiscal policies yet fleece those citizens to the maximum extent without their knowledge.

And its successful. The vast majority of Americans have no real idea of how much taxes they pay and they blindly keep electing politicians who perpetuate the shell game we call ‘the U.S. Tax Code’.

The first step to any real reform must be to get the truth out so American taxpayers get angry; and they should be VERY angry.

There are currently 3 main vehicles for federal taxation. One is actually called Federal Income Tax. That’s the tax vehicle whereby LAW-ABIDING wage-earners (not nearly everyone) have 20%, 30% or more of their paychecks confiscated and then are allowed to spend time and money to try and get a small portion of that confiscated money returned back to them on April 15th. This form of taxation is proclaimed as being ‘progressive’ since it burdens lower-income Americans less than higher-income ones.

The second form of tax is called FICA, where LAW-ABIDING wage-earners (again not nearly everyone) have 15% of their paychecks confiscated in the name of 2 other BROKE shell games called Social Security and Medicaire. This form of taxation is definitely ‘regressive’ in that all below-$90,000 wage-earners pay exactly the same rate while higher-level wage-earners pay effectively a LOWER RATE.

The third form of tax is the most hidden (and regressive) of all. It is corporate income taxes. This tax is a cost of doing business just as is labor or material costs, so it is simply built into the price of American goods and services. Probably the biggest tax lie is that corporations somehow pay taxes. All they can do is collect taxes from consumers in the form of higher prices for their goods and services. These taxes (in the form of higher prices) are paid by not only the final consumer but by every manufacturer in every step of production along the whole production life-cycle. And prices are higher not only because of this insidious corporate income tax but also because of the huge compliance costs these corporations have to pay (lawyers, accountants, lobbyists, etc). It is estimated that 15-25% of the cost of EVERY good or service in the U.S. is attributable to the corporate income tax ‘scheme’.

Mad yet? Thought you knew from those infamous Federal Income Tax tables what your tax rate was? That published rate isn’t even close! In most cases, not even half-way. Thought that all Americans paid personal income taxes? Nearly half don’t (mostly those that don’t rely on a conventional paycheck), leaving the other half to pick up their slack.

What’s the remedy? Well, how about telling the TRUTH about the rate of taxation. And how about SLASHING the REAL effective tax rate approximately in half from what it is now. And how about forcing all Americans to ACTUALLY pay their share of that tax.

There is legislation before the Congress to do just that! In the House of Representatives it’s called HR25. In the Senate it’s called S25. In plain English it’s called the Fair Tax.

Basically, the Fair Tax will consist of

· A single sales tax paid for each RETAIL purchase

· A single payment each month to every American to offset ALL sales taxes on essential spending

I will leave the specifics of The FairTax for you to discover, which I truly hope you will do. But the specifics all revolve around those 2 simple basics.

When our Founding Fathers formed this Republic, they never in their wildest dreams conceived of a populace having their income taxed. Taxation without representation was a call to arms that formed the United States. And taxation then was an import tax on luxury items, which the wealthy in effect chose to pay by their lifestyles.

Somewhere in the early 20th century the Founder’s dreams went wildly wrong. In a nation founded upon a Constitution, an evil called ‘implied powers’ was naively adopted as a means of circumventing the document that was meant to be the blueprint for humanity’s grand experiment. What has resulted is a bloated, inefficient government where the vast majority of its functions have ABSOLUTELY no Constitutional basis.

And what feeds ‘implied powers’ and this runaway cycle of unwarranted federal expansion: MONEY. It’s citizens’ money, in the form of taxes. So in 1913 an evil con job gets fostered on the Constitution to give the United States government a license to confiscate money from its citizens in almost unlimited fashion. That con was called the 16th Amendment. And since then the money flow (and resulting growth thru ‘implied powers’) has never abated.

By the way, another fact about The FairTax is that it starts the Constitutional process for repeal of that 16th Amendment.

As I have already pointed out, United States federal taxation is all based on lies and convoluted rules that can’t easily be comprehended. After all, no amount of ‘implied powers’ would be tolerated if Americans really knew that the 25% Federal tax rate they occasionally complain about was effectively more like 50%.

And even that obnoxious rate isn’t high enough for the Washington politicians of the past 50 years. We can’t even pay for the United States government to function each year, much less pay for the approximately $200 BILLION (and growing) interest payments on the accumulated national debt our esteemed leaders have piled up.

Taxation without representation really wasn’t all that bad when the alternative is TAXATION BY LIE (with representation, though)!

Few Washington politicians will ever expose the shell game, though. They can’t! A revolt would surely ensue. And if you think it makes a bit of difference whether those politicians are Democrat or Republican then you are just part of the problem. They all spend your money with reckless abandon. Their primary responsibility IS NOT to the United States but IS to promise increased spending to get re-elected.

That makes change entirely up to the American people. This is incidentally where the framers of the Constitution meant Governmental change to emanate from.

It’s called GRASS ROOTS. And don’t tell me it can’t work. I refuse to believe the United States of America is so far gone that we the people can’t effect our own government. I refuse to believe we can’t reclaim our Constitution.

Educate yourself on the Fair Tax. Visit www.FairTaxWarrior.com or www.fairatx.org and check out the facts. Read our arguments. Locate and attend local volunteer meetings. Get involved. Call your Representative and Senators.

We need all the help we can get. This country deserves to be put back on track.

1 comment:

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