Random and Belated Tax Day Musings
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Tax Day invariably reminds me of just how much I absolutely detest the federal and California governments (as opposed to the country and the state themselves; contra this gibbering imbecile, the sustainably-grown organic free-range sweetener in whose non-fat latte has caused him to mistake President Obama after just three months for “the first successful president in two generations,” a government is distinguishable from a political subdivision). Every year when I add up the numbers I’m dismayed to find that somewhere north of a third of my income is being confiscated by creeps, allegedly to further some ill-defined common good, but in reality to feather a lot of nests and give handouts to a lot of deadbeats. Let’s be clear: I have absolutely no problem paying a reasonable amount of money to fund the essential functions of government. I’d chip in my share for police and fire services, for national defense, and for worthwhile public works like road maintenance. But my tax burden is so far removed from “reasonable” (never mind fair), and most of what it funds so far removed from “essential” or even “worthwhile,” that it positively beggars the imagination.
I often imagine that the Founding Fathers are rolling over in their graves. After yesterday’s Tea Party protests, though, I expect that Samuel Adams, wherever he is, has a fleeting smile on his face.
From the Irony Is Dead department: apparently the political left, all the way up to Madame Speaker’s office, is complaining — without any real evidence, mind! — that the Tea Party protests are astroturf. This after the last eight years of George Soros playing Daddy Warbucks to prop up every lefty cause imaginable.
It’s telling, I think, that when confronted by populist anger over taxes and government spending, the political left and much of the mainstream media (to the extremely limited extent the two are distinguishable) reach into their collective quiver and come up with… “teabagging” jokes. This is lame thrice over. For one thing, the “teabag” tittering is approximately as predictable as the sun coming up in the east; it was never particularly clever or funny, except within the tee-hee-those-center-right-folks-are-so-ridiculous liberal-media circle-jerk. For another thing, is it really such a hot idea to associate, however indirectly, crass sexual quasi-humor with one of the iconic episodes of American revolutionary history? Were those guys who dumped tea into Boston Harbor in 1773 “teabaggers,” too? For a third thing, dismissiveness and contempt isn’t a substantive response, and while you may not think the protestors deserve such, you are eventually going to have to answer for the staggering orgy of spending that the Obama administration has embarked on — as dreadful a steward of the public purse as George W. Bush was, Mr. Obama has in just three months proven himself even worse.
To my mind the single biggest obstacle to building a significant and lasting constituency for small government is the temporal distance between when we pay tax and when we hold our political leaders democratically accountable. Because of withholding, most of us don’t feel the bite except around April when we have to add up the numbers to file our returns — and by the time Election Day rolls around, seven months later, most of us have forgotten just how thoroughly we were taken to the woodshed by our government. Solution: end withholding, so that everybody has to save throughout the year and write a big check for the full amount on Tax Day, and then move Tax Day to the first Monday in November (i.e., the day before Election Day).
Unfortunately, we’re approaching the tipping point: currently 43.4% of single or jointly-filing taxpayers pay zero or negative federal income taxes (i.e., they either pay no income tax, or they get a government handout). While many of these people still pay something in payroll taxes like Social Security or Medicare, we’re nonetheless inching towards a situation where a majority of the country has no skin in the federal income tax game, and can vote itself freebies out of other people’s wallets with impunity.
With respect to the whole “paying taxes is patriotic” rot, I give you Billy Beck, and note further that Paul Begala is one of the most loathsome pieces of human excrescence currently stealing valuable oxygen from the rest of us.