For libertarians taxation is theft.
For statists taxation is deft.
Deft? Yes:
“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to procure the largest quantity of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.”—17th Century French Minister of Finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert
Some see taxation as a “necessary evil” while others see it as “what we pay for a civilized society.” Economist Mark Skousen sees it this way:
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure.
Libertarians see it for what it is; theft. Taxation, in fact, is the fuel of corruption, war and the extravagantly opulent lifestyles coveted by a tiny coldblooded cadre of ruling elitist parasites far beyond anything any earlier king, czar, emperor or conqueror could have possibly imagined.
So where does all this loot come from today?
But wait, let’s back up a moment. President Trump trumpets that he has brought us “the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history.” But are taxes really cut? While cuts are made to some taxes accompanied by grand speeches and soundbites and photo ops most observers are very aware that other taxes get very quietly tweaked upwards to make up for the cuts.
Federal, state, county and local taxes, from income to sales to property to estate to gift to tobacco to alcohol to hotel to death taxes and more get pushed upward and never before levied taxes get levied. Note how ravenously the tax-takers continue to go after more and more online taxes for example.
And then, of course, the tax-grabbers inevitably spend more than they’ve grabbed because they’re pathologically incapable of spending less and so go looking for even more to grab.
Ultimately there’s no such thing as a real tax cut; while your left hand gets a tax cut your right hand gets a tax increase.
And then there’s the current ongoing business of Trump stumping for tariffs on a multitude of imported goods. A tariff of course is just a different kind of tax. Don’t forget that in the long run it’s always the end user—commonly known as individual, citizen, taxpayer, etc.—who pays all taxes.
So let’s go back a few years before Trump became Tax-Axer and Tariff Sheriff and see where all this loot comes from despite what any politician says or does.
According to usgovernmentrevenue.com the total actual taxes that the statists squeezed out of us from all federal, state and local sources in 2017 topped out at $6.1 trillion. Future “guestimates” are expected to go even higher.
The same source reported the Gross Federal Debt held by “the public”—commonly known as individuals, citizens, taxpayers, etc.—topped out at $20.21 trillion. If the tax cuts are real that top will top out much higher. If the tariff wars actually take off there’s no telling what will top off where.
And don’t forget that we—individuals, citizens, taxpayers, etc.—pay the interest on the national debt.
Virtually all figures concerning taxation and debt are “guesstimates” and therefore all sources vary. A 2015 Forbes article for example pegged the national debt at $18 trillion then with every individual owing $154,161, but projected the debt “to approach $21 trillion by 2019.”
But are any of those guesstimates really anywhere close to the actual taxes that the tax-squeezers squeeze out of us? We all do, no matter how frugally we live, pay taxes on taxes on taxes on taxes on every product we buy.
These are commonly called “hidden taxes.” So how does that happen?
Taxes are just another expense of developing and manufacturing the products that the majority of us need or want, right along with paying for leases, utilities, equipment, supplies, raw materials, maintenance, employee wages, etc. Manufacturers will typically pay business, gross receipts, sales, excise, self-employment, unemployment, payroll, inventory and franchise taxes and so on depending on the individual company.
Once a product is produced it must be sold for more than the total cost of all the expenses that went into producing it plus a markup for profit that goes into paying investors, stockholders, constant modernization, upkeep and retooling and all of the many other expenses required to keep a business going. That, remember, includes the expense of paying taxes.
Depending on how competitive an industry is, as many of those expenses as possible including the tax expense are passed down the supply chain to the next business in line, such as the transportation provider that adds its own expenses, the wholesaler that adds its own expenses, the distributor that adds its own expenses, the retailer that adds its own expenses and eventually on to the final end using consumer who pays for all of those expenses and taxes embedded in the shelf price even before reaching the checkout counter where city, regional and state sales taxes may be added on top of them all.
But those still aren’t all the taxes we pay.
A tax, according to the Collins English Dictionary, is “a compulsory financial contribution imposed by a government to raise revenue…” That means every penny you pay to government is in fact a tax whether it’s called a fine, fee, license, permit, penalty, certification, levy, charge, special assessment, duty, toll, tariff, rate, asset forfeiture, property seizure, surcharge, parking meter, traffic violation fine or some other euphemism.
With this in mind Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse Blog soberly observes in “A List of 97 Taxes Americans Pay Every Year” that most Americans don’t have a clue how many taxes are fleeced from their pockets. “By the time it is all said and done,” he says, “a significant portion of the population ends up paying more than half of what they earn to the government.”
Some sources claim that the average family’s tax bill exceeds what they pay for food, clothing and shelter combined. Little wonder two working adults can barely keep a family afloat today when it once required only one adult worker to support a family.
The most visible, common and frequent of those 97 taxes mentioned above are for telephone (911 service, federal excise, federal universal service, minimum usage surcharge, universal access, state and local taxes), gasoline (federal and state excise taxes), utilities (electric, gas, water, waste, recycling taxes), cable TV (broadcast TV surcharge, regulatory video cost recovery, state cost-recovery, state local video facilities, state local video service franchise, city district sales, city local sales, state sales taxes), restaurant dining (meals, excise, tourism, sales, convention, economic development taxes), and the beat goes on.
The only way you can possibly avoid some, but not all, of these taxes is to operate in what government calls the black market, what economists call the cash only market, or what libertarians call the free market.
And just think, American colonists fought a long bloody war against the biggest superpower on earth over what virtually everyone would agree today were trivially tiny taxes.
So where do all of those taxes go?
They go to everything the average contented middleclass taxpayer wants them to go to: highways and airports and schools and food inspectors and dog catchers and hospitals and cops and fire and military and every social welfare program imaginable.
But a whole lot of that money just disappears from all accountability.
From Reuters News Agency: “the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.”
So where did $6.5 trillion go? Of course the money doesn’t just disappear. Nobody flushes it down a toilet, runs it through a paper shredder, stuffs it in a mattress and forgets about it, or leaves it out for the same dog that ate their homework to eat.
It ends up in politically connected people’s overseas bank accounts. It corrupts the most powerful, and therefore easiest, politicians to vote for whatever the army wants. It gets siphoned off into secret CIA operations used to intervene, destabilize, execute, assassinate, intimidate, bribe or whatever it takes to make governments around the world do what the CIA demands that they do. Or maybe it was “donated” to the Clinton Charitable Foundation for the Coronation of Ste. Hillary.
(Wasted money, that!)
Maybe $400 million of it ended up on pallets in a C-130 military cargo plane that was landing in Iran just as the Iranians were releasing American hostages in a coincidence that looked like a cash-for-captives caper.
But most of that “missing” $6.5 trillion almost certainly ends up in the possession of the—forgive the repetition here—coldblooded cadre of ruling elitist parasites used to living far beyond anything any earlier king, czar, emperor or conqueror could have possibly imagined.
And remember, the political elite love to conflate “defense” with “military” to confuse us. True “defense spending” is only a small part of “military spending.” The rest of it goes toward national and international empire building.
But apparently that—another repetition—average contented middleclass American taxpayer just doesn’t care as long as she and he think they’re getting more from the massive legalized government embezzlement system than they’re losing to it.
Instead of these knee-jerk status quo government-lovers telling themselves “Think of all the wonderful things we get because of all those taxes we pay” libertarians strongly suggest that they free themselves from their stunted mindset and begin asking themselves, “What wonderful things could we have if we weren’t buying mansions, summer homes, private jets, limos, oceangoing yachts, luxurious global vacations, haute couture, haute cuisine and haute bedmates for our masters?”
And then of course there’s the most insidious and despicable tax of all, the infamous inflation tax that vandalizes our savings. But that’s a whole ‘nother ugly discussion for another day.
Garry Reed writes as The Libertarian Opinionizer at HubPages.com.
