Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Every single April 15th there is one. A snotty, sneering, attention-whoring editorial like this one.
Well let’s back up. I’ve got this extended lunch break I really can’t spare. I have a one o’clock meeting I cannot miss, it’s April 15th, and I’m at the Post Office with my girlfriend’s federal return, her Franchise Tax Board return, a bill payment that has to get in the mail today, that silly census form, and my own IRS return. I get everything else taken care of, and I avail myself of the latest technology so that I can get my federal return enveloped, addressed and stamped. By means of that kiosk. Which I’m pretty sure I did last year and the year before.
Machine asks me “What zip code would you like to mail this to?” and I look at the tax return on page two, toward the bottom. Now, ever since I was a little kid, to the best I can recall, it’s got that “If you have a refund coming mail it here…if you owe money mail it here…” right above where they ask you for your bank routing number, etc. We-ell, it’s not there. I don’t have any record of this. Everything else is signed and ready to go. But for lack of an address, which is really just a nine-digit zip, I have to step out of line, go to my meeting, and come back later that afternoon. Because the form’s been changed.
Maybe my memory’s faulty. Has this been going on for awhile? Downloaded it from a different place on the web site? What’s going on here?
I don’t really care what the answer is. You probably know where I’m going with this: It’s little things like this. After awhile, it feels like fighting someone…before you even get to the part about haggling over the tax liability.
Seriously. If my life is missing that, I’ll just drive around Folsom. Can’t go here, can’t go there, now that you’ve gone here you have to go there…don’t you dare make a U-turn here.
And then this jackhole writes an editorial about how he loves paying taxes (hat tip to Robert Stacy McCain). Or rather, some jackhole of an editor figures he’ll pump up his circulation by demanding a provocative column about how wonderful it is to pay taxes. It’s got all the tired retreads, you’ve seen ’em before.
Paying income taxes confirms my pride as a modern-day American citizen. As loudly as I might declare my love for this country, I need to put my money where my mouth flaps. For those like me — not fighting in Afghanistan, not toiling in our foreign service, not extinguishing fires or fighting crime as a public servant — paying taxes makes real my commitment to a functioning America.
Besides the crucial social goods that taxes yield (schools, roads, soldiers, embassies, air traffic control), there are key business-related dividends that benefit people, including Tea Partiers, in the long view. Tax-supported research propagates new ideas to help make companies profitable and hiring. The microchip, the Internet, cellphones: Pick your daily necessity, and the government played a fundamental and pro-active part supporting the research and development necessary to get that product launched and its industry humming. The Tea Partiers dubiously downplay and deny government’s crucial role incubating the innovations that shape our economy and change our lives.
Pick your daily necessity, and it depends on the government getting its fingers into our pockets. The people who pay these taxes, the businesses that pay these taxes, they don’t bring us these “daily necessities,” oh no no no. They/we are all just kind of in-the-way. Government builds the useful things, prints up the money that it owns, and then through its niceness greatness and wonderfulness it generously allows us riff-raff to borrow some of it all for awhile.
McCain righteously takes him out to the woodshed over this:
For Benjamin, it’s all about how taxes make him feel, or rather, how he feels about people who are less happy to pay taxes. Like all liberals, Benjamin cannot seem to grasp two important points about taxation:
* Taxes are not voluntary. If Benjamin wished to pay more taxes than he currently does, no one would stop him from doing so. His argument for high taxes, however, supports the compulsory collection of additional revenue from his fellow citizens. Why are Benjamin’s positive feelings about taxes more important than the negative feelings of those who wish to keep more of their own earnings?
* Taxes extract wealth from the private economy. Money that is collected by the government as tax revenue is money that is not available for investment in business. Progressive taxation, which imposes higher rates on the wealthy, thus has the long-term effect of causing disinvestment, removing capital from the economy.You can’t make capitalism work without capital, and high taxes hinder the accumulation and efficient allocation of capital. Benjamin lays aside the usual liberal theme — demonizing the rich — just long enough to stigmatize as “churlish” those who advocate economic liberty. He highlights non-controversial uses of government revenue as a way of implying that those who complain about high taxes are opposed to such things. He is not engaged in economic argument, but in political sophistry.
Honestly, I do see points on both sides. We might have started off without an income tax, and it’s horribly invasive to our privacy, arguably mutually exclusive from the kind of freedom we were meant to have. But we’ve got one now, we’re stuck with it. We do pay less in tax than the people in some of those pretend-countries like Sweden, Canada, the UK, et al. The places where you’re supposed to have something called “freedom” but you’re required to let the “bobbies” into your “flat” so they can count how many teevee sets you have and make sure they’re all properly licensed.
That doesn’t mean we’re not way far off the beaten path.
The one thing I resent the most — is the “soak the rich” aspect of it. It doesn’t matter that I’m not really rich. The whole spirit of it is anti-American. Government being put in charge of using the tax code to make sure no one person gets too big…unless he has a job in the Government and then that’s quite alright.
It’s not even followed-through-on. Exemptions, loopholes, shelters are used to make sure “The Rich” don’t really have to pay “Their Fair Share.” Even then, it would still be wrong…but as it is, government is there to make sure you cannot accumulate more than a certain amount of money unless you have the right friends. We end up with a mammoth tax code that nobody…professionals included…really understands. It’s impossible to understand because it really comes down to on-the-spot judgment calls made by complete strangers based on poorly-written rules.
The end result? Just another piece of what’s supposed to be called “America”…yet another item of machinery that is supposed to put us all on “equal” footing, and in reality labors long and hard to achieve the exact opposite. To manufacture a layer of aristocracy.
Update: Bill Whittle could not have seen this item, since it had not yet appeared when he hopped into a time machine and jumped backwards to ask some “reasonable men” what they thought of the Tea Party movement (hat tip to Neal Boortz).
A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government…
…and a whole lotta others.
I wonder how Mr. Benjamin would square his ideas up against that. Don’t tell me, let me guess: The reasonable-men are all raaaaaaacists or something.
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Tax forms should include a table to allow you to allocate your taxes to programs. If you pay taxes, the money goes to those programs. If you don’t pay taxes, your “refund” comes from the budget for those programs. Any program that “goes broke” gets eliminated.
- Jason | 04/16/2010 @ 21:34