Taxation is inherently authoritarian, but it’s not necessarily unfair. What is unfair is a system in which 2 families with identical characteristics can pay wildly different amounts of tax based on their exploitation of vagaries of the tax code. Similarly, it is unfair for family A to pay 25% of their income in tax when…
Category: Taxation
Bill Clinton Denies Responsibility of Policy Makers Again
Former President Bill Clinton was busy today, again denying that policy makers bear any responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Apparently to Clinton and other liberal leaders, President Obama being one such, there is no correlation between their tax-and-redistribute agendas and resentment on the part of those burdened with the impact of the legislation…
Texas Man Blows Stack, Slams Plane into IRS Building
What made Joe Stack, 53, a computer programmer with a history of trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, write a lengthy diatribe blasting the government in general and the IRS in particular, then deliberately take to the air and crash his private plane into an office building housing the IRS’ “office of last resort”, killing…
The True American Virtue
David Brooks summarizes Michael Kazin thusly and captures the true American virtue in print almost by accident: The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for…
U.S. Tax Policy Must Regress
In a short, direct article Scott Hodge debunks one of the radical left’s essential talking points, namely that the American rich don’t pay enough taxes to support their poorer countrymen. On the contrary, the U.S. system is more liberal than any other country in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Government Taxation vs. Charity
Economist Dr. Arnold Kling made a short, sweet distinction between government taxation/wealth redistribution and charity, saying “if you want to tax me in order to give my money to charity, that does not make you generous.” This fact is lost on the editors of the NY Times, who bemoaned a cut in estate taxes for the wealthiest American families.
The Brokest Generation
Mark Steyn tries, probably in vain, to point out to Gen Y’ers exactly what their support for Barack Obama’s big-spending ways will mean to them and their children. We want to help the sick and heal the planet by voting for massive unsustainable government programs. Like the young, we’re still finding ourselves, but when we…
Thwarting Barack Obama
Michelle Bachmann, she of we-should-investigate-anti-American-members-of-Congress infamy, said today that Republicans must do whatever they can to keep Democrats from consolidating power during Barack Obama’s time in office: they’re trying to consolidate power, so we need to do everything we can to thwart them at every turn to make sure that they aren’t able to, for…
Who is John Galt?
Steve Hayward says that if Barack Obama’s trillion-dollar tax increase is implemented that he will go on strike in the fashion of John Galt, Ayn Rand’s famous lead in Atlas Shrugged. …my bigger idea is to go all Randian and literally go on strike (and I’ve never really been much of a Rand fan, by…
Democrats and Taxes: Math is Hard
When Barack Obama selected Tom Daschle to be his secretary of Health and Human Services one of the last thinks he could have imagined was that Daschle was a 6-figure tax evader. Yet here we are again. What is it with Democrats and taxes? According to Vice-President Joe Biden, paying taxes is a patriotic duty. …