Tag: taxes

Americans Spend 6.6 Billion Hours on Taxes

Americans Spend 6.6 Billion Hours on Taxes

Income taxes are really, really bad. And I don’t mean that they are bad because they are expensive, I mean they are bad because they hurt the nation.

This is one example: the tax code is so convoluted that it takes hours and hours of people’s lives just to comply with them — and if you consider the millions of hours corporations have to spend complying, it’s worse.

The income tax will never be made reasonable, however. It doesn’t matter how really, really bad income taxes are for the economy and the nation. They are just too useful a tool for politicians. As long as a ‘deduction’ system is in place, politicians can pander to special groups with promises of deductions, and continue to ‘soak the rich’ to get more votes from people in lower tax brackets.

The nation did fine for over a century with no federal income tax. The truth is, as this country was intended to function, income taxes are totally unnecessary. But since the entitlement mentality will never be purged from society now, as it is far too ingrained (welfare, social security, Medicare, etc), at the very least the progressive income tax should be replaced with either a flat-rate income tax or a national sales tax. But both systems would eliminate or significantly impede the ability of our politicians to take money from your pocket and give it to someone else.

So it will never happen.

John Kerry: Tax the rich; Abortions for poor people!

Tonight’s presidential debate was quite a bit better than I anticipated. Usually, these “town hall debates” do little but showcase the ignorance of the voting populace. But this time, I was pleasantly surprised because most of the questions were actually decent questions. Of course, anybody paying attention to the campaigns already knows the answers to all of the questions asked, but at least the questions weren’t insipid as they tend to be in these settings.

One exchange that really sticks out in my mind is where Kerry basically states his position that poor people don’t have enough abortions.

Asked about federal funding of abortions, Kerry launched into a litany about the right of a woman to kill her unborn child. This showed an immense amount of disrespect to the woman who asked the question, because her question stipulated that abortion is legal in our country, and her question wasn’t about whether or not abortion should be legal. But after a while, Kerry finally got around to addressing her question.

“…and making certain that you don’t deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the constitution affords them if they can’t afford it otherwise.”

Kerry said that if abortion is guaranteed as a right by the US Constitution, then the federal government needs to help people who can’t afford it. Here Kerry made two points:

1. That if something is a right guaranteed by the Constitution, that the federal government is obligated to give it to people who don’t have the means. I wonder, does this extend to gun ownership? Kerry has gone to great lengths to hide his record in the Senate of legislating against the Second Amendment, so far as to brandish a hunting firearm at a rally. So, if someone is too poor to afford that weapon, which the Constitution guarantees him a right to own, is Kerry going to make the government give him one? And if the Constitution guarantees my right to own property, does the government have to give me property I can’t afford?

2. Kerry basically argued that poor people don’t have enough abortions. He went on about family planning (code words for killing unborn children) and said that a poor person shouldn’t be denied the right to an abortion just because they can’t afford the procedure. He is now arguing for MORE POOR PEOPLE TO HAVE ABORTIONS. Since the federal government does not currently pay for poor people to have abortions, he is by logical extension arguing that not enough poor people have abortions (otherwise, why fund them? Obviously Kerry sees some kind of need not being met).

What does Kerry have against poor people? Not everyone can marry wealthy women like he did (there are only so many of them to go around, and he’s married TWO already). Why single them out for more abortions?

Now, some of you probably are thinking that I am taking this way too far — that Kerry doesn’t really believe that we need more abortions. After all, Kerry also said that we need LESS abortions in the US. Well, indeed he did say that. But this is yet another instance where he is trying to have it both ways.

When Kerry argues for more funding for after-school programs, does that mean he thinks more kids need after-school programs? Of course. If someone takes the position that the federal government needs to pay for more police officers, doesn’t that imply that the same person believes that there are not enough police officers? Kerry is saying that the federal government needs to pay for abortions for poor people. This implies two things quite clearly and unmistakably: that Kerry believes that not enough poor people are having abortions, and that the government needs to step in and make sure more poor people have abortions.

Reporters can’t read

On Google news today, you can find hundreds of stories by eager reporters, all beside themselves going bonkers for a new report that supposedly proves that the Bush tax cuts are increasing the tax burden on the middle class. Of course, this is great for the Kerry campaign and their Marxist class-warfare rhetoric. We will hear no end to how Bush is robbing the poor to give to the rich.

Well, these reporters can’t read. In their excitement over finding something to give to their liberal buddies in the democratic party, they’ve basically ignored the parts of the report that don’t suit their “workers of the world unite” agenda. Alas, Bush is not going to come to your middle-class home, steal your child’s piggy bank, and give it to Bill Gates.

In fact, the report shows that in 2005, the top 20% of income earners will have their share of the tax burden increased, not lowered, under the Bush tax cuts. These reporters, zealous for the cause of getting Hitl…, uh, Bush, out of office, are trying to spin a report so that they can make headlines saying that despite everyone in the country paying less in taxes, Bush really, sneakily, actually raised taxes on the middle class.

And the most ridiculous aspect of this journalistic spasm of joy is that they are complaining that the top 20% of wage earners “only” pay 64% of the tax burden! That’s less than a quarter of tax payers shouldering almost two-thirds of the Federal Government’s gluttony.

But what’s so revolting about this is the fact that politicians can actually get elected running on a platform of soaking the “rich.” Instead of a country where people aspire to generate wealth, people now envy and resent it, voting for men who promise to remove more wealth from the economy and have the government spend it instead of the wage earners.