‘Forward, the Tax Payers!’
Was there a man dismay’d ?
Not tho’ the payer knew
Congress had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to pay & die,
Into the valley of Oppression
Rode the American Citizen.
If you are an aficionado of English literature, specifically poetry, you will recognize my adaptation above of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous ode to the charge of the Light Brigade. If you are not familiar with the history behind this famous poem, it was written to commemorate a suicidal charge of light cavalry of the British army in the battle of Balaclava (Ukraine) in the Crimean War (1854-56). Of the 637 men who began the charge, 247 of them were killed or wounded and the attack failed miserably. Today, as I write this, our congress and president are poised to order the taxpayers of this nation to commit a similar economic suicide charge that will cripple our ability to recover from the oppressive recession that they, though their reckless and irresponsible fiscal decisions, have brought upon us.
On January 1, 2011 the tax rates that all Americans pay on their income from all sources will increase dramatically. Every income tax bracket will increase and one more will be added. Those on the lowest end of the economic spectrum will see their rates jump by fifty percent (from ten percent to fifteen percent) ─ this despite almost universal warnings from economists from one shore to the other that raising taxes during a recession will put the economy into a crash dive that we may not be able to pull out of.
In my introductory essay on this topic I established the case that government does have a legitimate right to levy taxes in order to carry out the responsibilities that its citizens have assigned to it. I also covered some of the basic kinds of taxes that are used by all levels of government in our nation, including one insidious tax that the Obama Administration is considering adding to our tax burden, the Value Added Tax (or VAT). We are today awash in taxes (hence my adaptation and modification of Tennyson’s poem). Various tax watchdog organizations have compiled lists of the various taxes to which we are subjected and the longest list I found had over fifty different taxes listed (and I doubt it was exhaustive)! None of the lists I encountered included the VAT currently under consideration, nor any of all of the other taxes hidden within the recently enacted Health Care “Reform” Law, nor any of those proposed by the so-called “Cap and Trade” legislation that has been proposed in congress and advocated for by the Obama Administration.
So just what is the most effective kind of tax that should be employed by our government in order to carry out its obligations? I shall leave for the moment to a future post this second question of the five I raised in the opening of the previous essay of this series. Instead I would like to proceed to the third question which was, “Upon whom should the taxes be levied?” If an individual receives gifts constantly for which he or she has to put forth no effort or sacrifice, those gifts or benefits quickly lose their value in the eyes of the recipients – they are neither appreciated nor well taken care of. As I intimated in the previous post, governments exist to protect civil society and our government has been charged with the responsibility of providing a secure society in which all men (and women) are free to pursue life, liberty and happiness, and to make of their lives whatever talents and ambition which they have, drives them to achieve. Everyone in this nation receives the benefits accorded by the government; hence a failure to contribute something, even if only a small portion, will cause them to adopt an entitlement mentality towards the freedom and liberties accorded to them by our constitution and government and to fail to appreciate just how precious these liberties and freedom are. Just considering the income tax (a topic I shall deal with in either the next post or the one following it), according to the latest figures available for the tax year 2007, the top one percent of tax payers, those earning an Adjusted Gross Income of $410,096 or greater, paid 40.42% of the entire income tax burden collected by the Internal Revenue Service. The top five percent, those earning an AGI of $160,041 or more, paid 60.63%, and the top twenty-five percent, those who earned an AGI of only $66,532 or more, paid 86.59% of the income tax burden. A full forty percent of income tax filers paid no income tax at all! Is it any wonder then that the fascists in the democrat party are so ably adept at playing the class warfare card in order to garner votes and keep themselves in power?! The following quote has often been misattributed to Benjamin Franklin but was most likely penned by an earlier historian in Europe (although the exact authorship is debated); nevertheless, its words ring as true as though struck from a bell cast of the purest gold regarding our situation today:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been about 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage” [emphasis added].
President Obama supposedly feels that everyone should have a stake in this nation by supporting it, but his tax policies and class warfare rhetoric belie this exchange he had with reporter George Stephanopoulos in early January 2009:
OBAMA: “What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government, what are we getting for it, and how do we make the system more efficient?”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “And eventually sacrifice from everyone.”
OBAMA: “Everybody is going to have to give. Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game. “
Though Obama pays lip service to this principle, his actions speak to the opposite position. In the Biblical story of God’s punishment of King David for his arrogance in taking a census of the people of his kingdom, the pestilence sent by God as punishment was halted at the threshing floor of a man named Araunah. David wished to purchase the property from Araunah in order to offer a sacrifice to God, but Araunah declined, instead offering to give the king his property. To this offer David gave an answer that bespeaks the principle of personal responsibility and appreciation: “No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing” [emphasis added]. Neither should anyone enjoy the fruits of freedom and liberty when it costs them nothing. I will offer what I feel has been set forth as the fair remedy to this in a later post; but suffice it at this time to have established the point that everyone who benefits from being a citizen in this nation should have a part, even a small one, in the maintenance of it. Is it no wonder then that Obama was elected and his minions keep getting re-elected because those groups that make up the core constituency of their party have learned that by voting for them they are voting “themselves largesse from the public treasury.”
The fourth question that I posed in that initial essay was “In what proportion should taxes fall upon those who pay them?” This has been the central question about taxation for centuries. The celebrated Montesquieu, in his monumental work The Spirit of the Laws, contradicted our current tax system ─ a system that is the backbone of every Marxist, Socialist and Fascist government ever erected:
“Public revenues must not be measured by what the people can give but by what they should give, and if they are measured by what the people can give, it must at least be by what they can always give” (Part II, Book 13, Chapter 1) [emphasis added].
Contrast this with Karl Marx’s statement in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” This has been part of the party platform of every tyrannical government that has ever existed, whether you call it Communist, Fascist or Socialist. This is what is behind the oft-repeated phase uttered by Obama and his fascist democrat cronies, that there must be a “spreading of the wealth around” ─ i.e., a forceful taking of wealth from those who created it by their efforts and distributing it to those who did nothing for it, according to what the central government sees as “fair and equitable.”
This ploy is as old as the fable of Robin Hood ─ the demonizing of those who are wealthy (which is anyone who has at least one dollar more than you do) and his justifiable robbery of them in order to give the plunder to the poorer inhabitants of the land. But what else would you expect from one whose experience has not been in creating jobs, opportunities or wealth, but instead was a rabble rouser who cut his teeth on the teaching of the Marxist Saul Alinsky? Alinsky’s thirteenth rule in his section on tactics in his book, Rules for Radicals, on stirring up animosity within a community, society or nation, is to “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Such is exactly the tactic used in the class warfare waged by Obama in his speeches regarding taxing the wealthy so that they “pay their fair share.” Furthermore, consider the thrust of what Alinksy held were the purposes of tactics (Alinsky’s son described Obama as the most expert student of his father’s principles of anyone who had been a follower of him): “Here our concern is with the tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves.” Combine this with his fifth rule of tactics and you can readily see how in the area of taxation and “wealth-spreading”, Obama is applying these Marxist principles of community upheaval on a national scale: “…the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.” Listen carefully to the words Obama uses the next time you hear him speak on this subject and see if you don’t recognize these tactical principles in his attack upon our society.
Having said this, however, still does not answer the question, which is, just how much should each individual pay in taxes? What is “fair” to everyone concerned? What “should” each individual pay, to go back to Montesquieu’s statement. Clearly, someone who earns $500,000 is able to pay more taxes than someone who only earns $50,000, but is it fair that just because he can he should? We are right back then to where we started with the quote from Montesquieu. Or in the words of President Obama, just how much “skin” should each individual “have in the game”? This whole notion of Marx and the “spreading of the wealth around” harkens back to the concept that everyone should be equal ─ that no one should have more than anyone else. To this belief the Nobel prize-winning economist and political philosopher, F.A. Hayek, argued in his book, Individualism and Economic Order:
“I can see no reason for trying to make people equal as distinct from treating them equally. While individualism is profoundly opposed to all prescriptive privilege, to all protection, by law or force, of any rights not based on rules equally applicable to all persons, it also denies government the right to limit what the able or fortunate may achieve. It is equally opposed to any rigid limitation of the position individuals may achieve, whether this power is used to perpetuate inequality or to create equality. Its main principle is that no man or group of men should have power to decide what another man’s status ought to be, and it regards this as a condition of freedom so essential that it must not be sacrificed to the gratification of our sense of justice or of our envy.
If all men were completely equal in their gifts and inclinations, we should have to treat them differently in order to achieve any sort of social organization. Fortunately, they are not equal; and it is only owing to this that the differentiation of functions need not be determined by the arbitrary decision of some organizing will but that, after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level … There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal” [emphasis added].
We can see how this concept of political correctness and equality is invading more and more areas of our lives, such as the absurdity of everyone being a winner in any kind of contest – that there are no such things as “winners and losers”. Thus those who possess superior skills in athletics, the arts, or any other area must not be recognized for the superiority of the gifts they possess, just as those who use their talents and ambition to succeed financially must be punished for their efforts by having the fruit of their labor taken from them and distributed to others. Many can see this absurdity in these other areas, but are blind to it when it comes to the subject of taxation. To this Ayn Rand aptly said, “ Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel!” Remember this, then, that the next time Obama talks about redistributing wealth he is viewing you and me as nothing more than chattel, to be manipulated by the government in the way it (he) sees fit! What is fair is you having the control over how much you pay in taxes, not the government ─ you deciding how much and when to pay taxes, and for everyone to have that same decision-making power and responsibility is the only fair way to levy taxes. This is exactly the solution proposed by the “Fair Tax”, which I will delve into in more detail when this series of essays concludes.
Perhaps, though, the over-arching question is the fifth question I initially raised, which is, “Just what are the legitimate purposes for the collection of taxes? For America, that answer lies in our Constitution, which for years has been abused in this subject of taxes and which abuse has created the burdensome and onerous tax system that afflicts us today. In my next post I will take a look at just what the Constitution authorizes, how Congress has over the years twisted it to justify the taxes taken from us, and look at just a few of the abuses this has led to.
- Epaminondas
