Why isn’t April 15th a day of national horror? Why are there no protests in the streets? The cost of taxation absolutley dwarfs any “damage” unfettered illegal immigration might be doing. The negative consequences of oppressive government confiscation of private property is in direct contradiction to everything the founders stood for. Why are Americans not outraged?
Just imagine your reaction to the following scenario: you have a small child and she is happily playing in her sandbox. Once a week however, another kid from the neighborhood kicks over half of the castles that your child has meticlulously built. Over time, the bully kindly tells your child which castles she intends to knock over and promises to do it quickly. Further, if your child agrees to help the bully with her math homework, the bully promises to knock down castles only every two weeks. Your options as a parent are:
a) Admonish your child for letting the bully do that;
b) Reward the bully for improving her behavior;
c) Stop allowing your child to make sand castles;
d) Demand that your child make even more castles, so that the net impact won’t be so bad;
e) Do nothing and sigh, “that’s just the way the world works and there is nothing we can do about it”
f) Build a fence around your child’s sandbox;
g) Encourage your child to beat-up the bully the next time it happens;
h) You find the bully’s parents and inform them of the situation;
i) Upon them doing nothing about it, you take action against the bully’s parents;
My intuition is that when it comes to your children, many of you would choose some combination of f, h and i. I don’t sincerely believe that a, b, c, d, e and g are things you would consider. Think now about the government stealing the majority of your earned income (by my calculations, my NET tax burden this year was nearly 50% of my earned income) and I live in a “low-tax” state. Where is the outrage? In 1775, a band of freedom loving individuals came together for among other reasons excessive excise taxes placed on goods sold in the colonies – and I promise you that the burden of those taxes was miniscule compared to the tax burdens we face today.
So, why are Americans not waking up to the harshness of the tax burden in the United States? It can’t be because Americans love the constitution. They allowed the 16th amendment to pass. But worse is that the IRS is granted powers that are unconstitional. For example, while in a criminal proceeding the government has the burden to prove that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt , in a tax proceeding the burden is on the taxpayer to prove that he or she does not owe the amount claimed by the IRS.
Perhaps because we look to Europe and say that we have lower taxes than them (that’s sort of like saying I’m the least ugly professor at the college). Perhaps the reason April 15th is of no real significance is that it is but one of so many ways the government is plundering us that it feels like fighting this issue is like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. We pay federal income taxes. We pay social security taxes. We pay taxes for unemployment insurance and workers compensation. We pay state income taxes. We often pay city and country income taxes. We pay sales taxes. We pay estate taxes. We pay capital gains taxes. We “pay” for an inflated currency and the government budget deficit. And these are just the most obvious. Perhaps we’ve been taxed into submission. This year, the average American will work 116 days to pay taxes, before any one of her bills are paid. She’ll work just 106 days for food, clothing and housing combined! On this Easter Sunday I pray that the fire of liberty burns bright enough in young Americans so that they will awaken to the evils injustice of this state sanctioned confiscation and do something about it before all of our essential liberties are lost. It certainly burns in this American.
