|
While
I admire the President for sticking to his proposed $1.6
trillion income tax cut even in the face of the typical liberal
distortions, I think it imperative that law-makers eventually
scrap the income tax all-together…and the payroll tax, and
property taxes and car taxes and state income taxes. All
of these gross deprivations of a citizen’s Constitutional
right to keep the fruits of his labor are a great hindrance
to the ability of Americans to create and maintain wealth for
themselves and for others. In the place of these
tyrannical excesses, I think it necessary to enact a national
sales tax.
Two premises really drive this argument: Morally, the
ability of a state, and by that I mean the collective
triumvirate of Federal, state and local governments, to tax
their citizens on average 40% to 50% of their income is
reprehensible. Besides discouraging people from working
harder to presumably earn more (or less), high taxes frustrate
individuals' and families' abilities to save and invest their
earnings. Economically, the ability of Americans to spend
more of their disposable income at their leisure and at their
discretion will assuredly increase the number of sales tax
receipts that flow into revenue-dependent Washington, D.C.
The key is that Americans decide what they are taxed on!
Americans work an average four months of every year just to feed
the federal government’s insatiable appetite. And what
do we get in return for this grand larceny? Relatively
little. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution
enumerates exactly what the legislature/government is supposed
to provide the citizenry with the peoples' tax dollars.
And if one strictly interprets the founding document for its
original intent, which I believe demands a very limited
government, the powers that are spelled-out would seem to
require a limited amount of taxation.
To be sure, our massive inter/intrastate highway program
adequately facilitates commerce among the states; the
pre-Clinton Immigration and Naturalization Service did a
reasonably good job of overseeing the naturalization of
immigrants; Congress has done quite well in creating mints that
“coin money and regulate the value thereof”; and the
congress has done an admirable job of “raising and supporting
armies and providing and maintaining a navy.” All of
these services and the few others listed in Art. I, Sec. 8 are
well and good, constituting a reasonable scope of the Federal
government; they go a long way toward ensuring and encouraging
the movement and functioning of a free people.
Accordingly, the level of taxation needed to fund these services
has been quite low throughout much of our nation's past, really
up until World War II. Even then, the excess taxation was
justified, as we were involved in a global conflict.
That said, consider the 16th
Amendment’s granting of Congress the “power to lay and
collect taxes on incomes, from whatever sources derived, without
apportionment among the several States, and without regard to
any census or enumeration.” This initial move away from
a justifiable level of taxation towards a state that wantonly
takes from the people a certain percentage of their net income
started the country down the very slippery slope of progressive
taxation, i.e. the wholesale redistribution of income.
From there on, the Congress felt empowered or justified or
deserving or whatever to collect taxes from citizens regardless
of whether the citizen received a direct benefit from his tax
dollars that were taken from him. Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s well-intentioned Social Security Act of 1936
instituted the payroll tax, which greatly expanded the reach of
the state into
ordinary Americans' lives. Benefits were to be based on
payroll tax contributions that the worker made during his/her
working life. Taxes would first be collected in 1937. And
then Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the
mid-1960’s further enhanced government’s ability to tax the
citizenry for all number of well-intentioned but poorly planned
and eventually bloated social programs.
Collectively, this expansion of taxation to
fund what I think to be very dubious, un-Constitutional social
programs has thieved trillions of dollars from American
taxpayers. But what if we did away with all of these
ridiculous taxes levied by all levels of government, and instead
replaced this tyrannical scheme with something much more
agreeable to our consumer-driven populace? A national
sales tax would hearken back to the colonial era, when colonists
were taxed on only those goods they consumed. A silversmith
would take home his gross salary commensurate with his work, and
only be levied a tax when he purchased a good for his family,
like tea or flour or wheat. People had to eat and drink
and stay out of the elements for survival, and so sellers and
the British and then early American government still garnered a
measurable amount of revenue from what would be appropriately
termed a “consumer tax.”
Next
page: Why it will work
Page
1 Page 2
|
Buy Books
Taxing
Ourselves: A Citizen's Guide to the Great Debate over Tax Reform
by Joel Slemrod, Jon M. Bakija
Does
Atlas Shrug? The Economic Consequences of Taxing the Rich
by Joel Slemrod
The IRS v. The People
by Jack Kemp (Editor), Ken Blackwell (Editor), Rush Limbaugh
Search
the Web for:
Middle
East
MP3
Web Music
George
W. Bush
Saddam Hussein
Hillary Clinton
Presidential Pardon
Online Gambling
Auto Loans
Free Online Games
NFL
Nascar
Britney Spears
|
