Ask yourself, when you vote in the next election, what is it you really want? Do you want incremental change for the better, or would you really prefer for our bloated, over-regulated, and corrupt government to be stripped down and rebuilt, restaffed, and rededicated to put public service first and to reaffirm a dedication to constitutional rule? We have been incrementally sliding into totalitarianism for generations. Are you really prepared to wait (and make your children wait) through generations to incrementally get back to what our constitution guaranteed us in the first place?
If not, then you need to be sufficiently open-minded to consider some bold initiatives – the kind your next-door neighbor smirks at and says, “it’ll never happen.” He could be right, but Paul Revere’s neighbors probably smirked at him too…
We need a revolution in our thinking, Just Imagine a world where everyone could afford to own a home, send a child (or, two) to college, carry high-quality healthcare coverage, fully fund a lucrative retirement fund, and have enough income left over to enjoy eating out, pursue hobbies, etc. Imagine a world where you could do all of this in a one-income family… Would this be a world worth fighting for? Without violating the spirit of the United States Constitution, we could have all of this now. Today we will discuss how diabolical and detrimental an income-based tax system (and the bloated government organization that enforces it) really are.
StressFreeBill’s Newsletter is published twice a week. Tuesday editions tend to carry a little more of a serious tone and address important political and social issues. Friday editions can be a little more rant-oriented, personal, and (hopefully) humorous. I’ve even been told these Friday editions are mostly coherent 😊
On previous Tuesdays, we have described the various factions of the new Ruling Class that is attempting to solidify total control of our country. You can revisit those issues HERE. For the next several Tuesdays, we will be taking a look at the bold steps necessary to really return our country to We The People.
‘What gets rewarded gets repeated,’ is a sound piece of wisdom. The converse is also true, ‘What gets punished diminishes.’ If we truly want to be a rich people who can enjoy all the bounty God has graced us with, why do we punish income? This is, by definition, what an income tax does - the more productive an individual is, the more they are punished (the more they have to pay). In reality, though, our system is much worse than that… we have a progressive income tax system. This means not only will you be punished more for earning more, but the severity (rate) of the punishment actually increases as you pass some arbitrary levels of achievement (tax brackets). Every economist knows this to be true, yet we seldom hear our tax code being discussed in such terms. Why is that?
We should stop calling it a Progressive Income Tax and start calling it a Punitive Income Tax.
It is because a huge number of classes and professions in our country benefit from punishing achievement. The following is a very incomplete list:
U.S. Congress – Congressmen and Senators have the ability to pick winners and losers via their ability to legislate special carveouts, deductions, and tax credits in the tax code, and create punitive or permissive regulations for industry (and society) to live by. This makes them very powerful people and huge targets for bribery, extortion, and corruption. Companies and Special Interests hire lobbyists to spend $Billions on lobbying Congress to give special carveouts, deductions, and tax credits to their favored group. The ability to pick financial winners and losers makes these politicians very powerful and the amount of money, favors, and gifts lavished on them is obscene. Try as we might, there are no ‘reform’ laws we can pass that will prevent a lobbyist from promising a great book deal, board seat, or lucrative career once the politician leaves office. The only way to curb this corruption in public service would be to remove the legislator’s ability to pick the winners and losers. If we did that, we might find that more Congressmen were willing to serve their term(s) for the public interest and then return home to their families and profession (instead of becoming career politicians). Moving our country away from an income-based tax code could remove a politician’s ability to manipulate it and, therefore, dramatically remove the corruption target from their backs. If a new tax code were coupled with a balanced-budget amendment, it could dramatically reduce the ability of our legislators to pass regulatory carve-outs and possibly remove the corruption target altogether.
The Wealthy – The very rich escape this punitive tax system simply because very little of their earnings are considered ‘income.’ Dividends, Capital Gains, appreciation, (and more) are taxed at very different and (inevitably) much lower rates. They also typically own companies that hire lobbyists and benefit from tax breaks their congressmen just so happened to have passed. If Congress is in the ‘Winners and Losers’ game, these people have the money to insure they are always on the winning side of the contest. The wealthy will never pay their fair share in an income-based tax system.
The Poor – This is a double-edged sword. The poor are disenfranchised from having any concern whatsoever about our government being fiscally responsible because they don’t pay taxes – they have no vested interest (government debt and waste are literally somebody else’s problem). However, most of our poor receive some type of governmental financial assistance. They also vote. As the percentage of poor in our country increases, we literally have an ever-increasing amount of charity cases dictating (voting) on how much charity everyone else has to give them. Our income tax system works perfectly for them – they live outside of it.
The Bankers – We live in a consumer-credit economy. Before Income Taxes were enacted in 1913, America was more of a savings-based economy. Banks make money by making loans and the most lucrative type of loan is consumer debt (think credit cards). The Federal Reserve and Congress have been pushing us ever further down the consumer-credit path – it is no coincidence that our tax code doesn’t punish spending but does punish saving (by taxing interest as income).
The Globalists – The multinational corporations and Ruling Class Oligarchs pushing Globalism want an unimpeded flow of goods across national borders. This means no tariffs or other types of taxes that might discourage consumer-credit spending. For the most part, they avoid U.S. Income Taxes because they can base (move) labor forces and production offshore. Having the government of the largest marketplace in the world (the U.S. economy) paid for on the backs of our middle class is just fine with them. We need to understand that Globalism is simply worldwide communism, and totalitarian societies develop into the haves (the Ruling Class) and the have-nots (the masses). There is no room for an upwardly mobile middle class in an authoritarian country. Progressive Income Taxes don’t punish the rich – they prevent everyone else from becoming rich.
The Big-government Bureaucrats (Deep State) – The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employs over 75,000 people and cost taxpayers almost $14B a year to operate. It is a behemoth institution hated almost equally by anyone who has ever had to deal with it – and the people who need to deal with it the most are typically small business owners (the bedrock of our middle-class). Numerous studies and Think Tanks have opined that the single biggest inhibition to entrepreneurship in the United States is the IRS. Its regulations are so byzantine, complicated, and capricious that you can be found guilty of breaking tax law even if you are following instructions given to you by the IRS help desk. It is virtually impossible for any size of business (or, self-employed) to file taxes without professional help. In recent years (and according to the findings of a federal judge), it has been weaponized by the Ruling Class to target political opponents (think Lois Lerner targeting Tea Party organizations). Many people suspect this case was only the tip of a huge iceberg. It is true that the government needs to raise revenue and it is true that the government would need some type of organization to investigate violations, but it is hard to visualize a worst-case scenario for a healthy middle class. If there were a method for the government to raise revenue without the IRS, it would be a boon to small businesses everywhere, increase productivity, reduce regulations (and the costs associated with them), and potentially add a couple of points to our nation’s GDP all by itself. In short, every single citizen of the United States would be richer if there were a viable alternative.
Ditching the progressive income tax code of the United States would not, by itself, transform us into that freer, richer, more perfect society we are striving for – but it would be a huge start (and would make possible many of the other reforms that could revolutionize our society). Next Tuesday, I’ll introduce you to what I fully believe to be a better option. An option so simple and so beneficial to us that you’ll be amazed… and, probably angry that the powers that be have done everything they can to ignore it and prevent you from learning about it.
StressFreeBill
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