The HUGE tax that is cleverly hidden to keep us from realizing how badly we are being screwed

“There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.”
Adlai Stevenson II, American politician and statesman

Most people grossly underestimate the amount of taxes they pay. For example, if you live in a state with a 6% sales tax, when asked how much they would pay in taxes on a $100 purchase, most people incorrectly answer $6. Hardly!

Where do corporations get the money for the exorbitant taxes they pay? From you—the consumer! To give boatloads of money to the government, corporations must extract boatloads of money from consumers. Taxes are just another business cost that are passed along to consumers, who ultimately pay all bills for corporations: taxes, raw materials, research and development, advertising, personnel, utilities, etc. Business taxes are embedded into the base price of the products you buy to camouflage them. The combined federal-state statutory corporate tax rate on profits is 39.3%, so you aren't just paying a bit more in taxes than you think, but much more. Furthermore, if you ponder this for a half-second, you will realize that you are paying taxes on taxes.

To appreciate your total tax burden, add the corporate tax rate on profits to your federal, state, and local income taxes. Then add your Social Security tax and double it, because the matching contribution paid by your employer is ultimately paid by the sweat of your brow. Then add property taxes, real estate transfer taxes, gasoline taxes, telephone taxes, other utility taxes, gift taxes, estate (death) taxes, state “usage” taxes, alcohol taxes, cigarette taxes, firearms taxes, luxury (e.g., boat) taxes, capital gains taxes, countless other taxes, and a bewildering number of fees for everything from driving a car to getting married to building a house (building permit, septic permit, well permit, driveway permit) that sap countless billions of dollars from American citizens to feed politicians and their not-always-benevolent aims. There are myriad fees for starting a business and running it, and additional fees if your business is one of the many ones subjected to additional regulation (food permit fees, astronomical FDA fees, medical license fees, DEA fees, etc.). Then there are fees for parking meters, driving on toll roads (and bridges and tunnels), traffic tickets (some of which are just another source of revenue for the government), and road usage taxes for truckers. If you buy a snowmobile or ATV, the government isn't satisfied by merely taxing you on its sales price; they also impose multiple never-ending registration and usage fees. If you ride a bicycle, own a dog or cat, hunt, fish, hike, or often just breathe in the wrong spot, the government has even more ways to pickpocket your money.

As if that is not enough subjugation, there are innumerable IRS penalties and court fines to drain even more dollars from citizens who might inadvertently not comply with one of the million and one laws and regulations. Except, of course, if you are Timothy “TurboTax” Geithner, who brazenly failed to pay taxes yet got off scot-free from the IRS because he is a big shot. Several Main Street people replicated Geithner's TurboTax defense in tax court, but the judges ordered them to pay back taxes, interest, and penalties, thereby proving there are indeed two sets of laws: one for the elite, and one for us small people.

The mind control technique known as political correctness has made it almost taboo to question the legitimacy of taxes. Liberals who are the lap dogs of tax-loving politicians, such as Obama, are especially fond of this technique. In their simple minds, anything the government wants to plunder is fair game. If you object, you're an extremist. You're not doing your patriotic duty, according to Joe Biden. Biden, who is notoriously ignorant of history, likely does not know that our Founding Fathers hated taxes so much that they equated them with slavery. (Read more on this topic: 1 2 3)

I once thought the United States government was the best thing since sliced bread. I now think it is essentially an organized crime ring that is hell-bent on controlling us and taking as much money from us as they can. The US Constitution expressly limits the powers of the federal government, but the thugs in Washington seem to think that their power is unlimited. In From Bailout to Bliss (it's free for personal use), I presented evidence supporting my contention that they are waging economic war against us. If you can't see that, you are precisely the kind of stupid sheeple they love. Cretins are easy pawns.

If Obama and Pelosi truly cared about you, they wouldn't work overtime trying to dream up ways to take more of your money and freedom. Money itself is strongly correlated with freedom for many reasons. Here is one that you may never have considered: You need a certain amount of money to live the life you want. As the government takes more of your money, you must either work more or accept a diminished lifestyle. If you work more, the government is essentially stealing your time, and therefore your life.

The government may now be stealing half of your working life, but with blithering idiot liberals perennially complaining about people not paying their “fair share,” three-quarters or more of your working life may soon go to the government, not you and your family. Some children born today will see 90% of their lifetime earnings confiscated. Why? Because they deserve to be punished? No, because they were born with enough brainpower and gumption to work hard enough so that liberals of the future will complain that they aren't paying their “fair share.”

Far and away the greatest proportion of the waking time in our lives is spent preparing for work (via education), working, commuting to and from work, and recuperating from work. Therefore, as the government takes an increasingly large percentage of the fruits of your labor, it is literally stealing your life from you.

Americans today are no longer free. The government has decided that it has a greater right to your money (and therefore time) than you do, so it can take as much as it wants, whenever it wants. If it needs more, it just fabricates another excuse to justify higher taxes or national debt that will eventually be paid in taxes. If you dare resist their confiscation, they will sic IRS goons on you and take even more of your money and time. The primary difference between the Mafia and the organized crime ring we call the federal government is that the Mafia is much less greedy.

As I pointed out in From Bailout to Bliss, if our leaders were smart and had no pathological need to control people, they could reduce taxes so much that they might even be able to send you a check every year. Now that is change you can believe in! If Obama is half as smart as what he is reputed to be, why can't he figure out how to do that?

A smart politician could think of a way to make people less resistant to taxation—in fact, he could make many people so happy to pay taxes that they would not ever think of trying to pay less than they owed. I presented a way to do that in one of my blog postings: A new way to pay taxes: with a smile. There are other ways, too. Can you think of any? If you are smart and understand human nature, this should be easy. I'll give you a hint: Rolls-Royce.

If you take a minute or two to read that blog posting, you will see that I could turn paying taxes into a joy that one looks forward to, and help put people back to work. Why haven't politicians thought of those ideas? Most people stop thinking after they come up with an answer to a problem. For politicians, the “answer to their problem” is to use force (or the threat of it, with their IRS and other goons) to make people do what they want. The message isn't subtle: Do it or you will be very sorry.

Ever hear about the carrot or the stick approach? To induce a desired behavior (paying taxes, in this case), one can use “carrots”—something rewarding—or one can use “sticks”: punishment.

Schoolyard bullies use force, or the threat of it, to get what they want. The government is the same way, using “sticks” (punishment) to get what they want. Granted, some people need sticks to make them behave, but most of us do not. Good people, and even average people, readily respond to the carrot approach. Yet the government pounds on its mighty chest and beats everyone over the head with sticks. They're goons.

Goons never see a need for a kinder, gentler approach because they can always get their way with sticks. However, as I pointed out in From Bailout to Bliss, people are getting very tired of being whacked by the government. I predict that citizens will figuratively grab the stick from the government and ferociously turn on them. When the beaters become the beaten, they will suddenly favor the carrot approach. If they were smart, they would adopt it now, before it is too late. Once the bottled up anger comes gushing out when our economy collapses, I predict that it will be a tsunami of revenge. Mussolini once was revered as being almost God-like. Remember what happened to him?

The carrot approach to governing would be even better for our leaders than for us, but the government is too hardheaded, too arrogant, and too stupid to implement mutually beneficial change. Obama's idea of change is more taxes and control for him, less money and freedom for you.

With many Americans now paying more in taxes than serfs did, if you are a deep thinker and not just another automaton who asks “How high?” when the government tells you to jump, you can't help but wonder if we are moving away from freedom and toward serfdom/slavery. If 100% of the fruits of your labor are taken from you, who could claim that you aren't a slave? Would you really be free if “only” 99% was taken from you? How about 90%? Or 75%? While these extreme degrees of confiscation are incontrovertible evidence of the erosion of freedom and the rise of serfdom/slavery, a logical threshold for differentiating whether one is more of a serf, or more free, is at the 50% level. Many of us now pay over half our income in taxes.

If you think that taxes are high now, just wait: Obama and his insatiably greedy liberal buddies will hike taxes in multiple ways. Before long, people who now pay half their income in taxes will pay three-quarters of it to the federal, state, and local governments. For every $1000 you make, you could keep $250 while the government confiscates the remaining $750. Fair? No, it is highway robbery. Obama promised us change. He meant it.

The government will not be satisfied with taking 75% of what you earn. They will invent one excuse after another to “justify” increasingly high tax rates, which ultimately will likely be 90% or more, leaving you with what will be more or less an allowance to spend on iPods and alcohol so that you can booze it up and forget how miserable you are—just as countless Russian citizens have done. Our government will ultimately seek to control almost all private property; home ownership will become a quaint memory. The government will let you live in a home—or, more likely, a cramped apartment—IF you keep your mouth shut and obey them. Their ultimate goal isn't just to tax us, but to control us. For proof of how they are succeeding, look at how much of the private sector they have engulfed. Then add in healthcare, energy, and the myriad other things that Obama wants to control.

Obama didn't know how many states we have, or what a P/E ratio is, but he thinks he is smart enough to run your life. Will you let him?

Notes:

  1. You pay more corporate tax than you realize if you consider only their tax and profit rates. For example, if you purchase a $100 product that generates a 10% profit, you might assume that you pay about $4 of corporate tax. You pay considerably more, because when that corporation purchased the products and services it needed from other corporations to make the product you bought, it paid their taxes, too. What we have is layers and layers of taxes, and taxes on taxes, that make it nightmarishly difficult to decipher how taxes add up along the supply chain. The government loves this complexity because it prevents people from knowing their total tax burden.
  2. Sociologists' Research Study Finds Everyday Tax Talk Is 'Morally Charged' based on What We Talk About When We Talk About Taxes
  3. The Most Outrageous Taxes
  4. When The Powerless Rise Up
    Excerpt: “When power is acquired or wielded legitimately (e.g., following a fair election or when actions are within authority), the likelihood for a successful cooperative environment is high, with the powerful leading and the powerless following. However, if power is borne of illegitimate means (in fixed elections or self-interested actions that exceed authority) this can motivate force and resistance from the powerless.”
The views expressed on this page may or may not reflect my current opinions, nor do they necessarily represent my past ones. After reading a slice of what I wrote in my various websites and books, you may conclude that I am a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican. Wrong; there is a better alternative. Just as the primary benefit from debate classes results when students present and defend opinions contrary to their own, I use a similar strategy as a creative writing tool to expand my brainpower—and yours. Mystified? Stay tuned for an explanation. PS: The wheels in your head are already turning a bit faster, aren't they?

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Reference: Imagining dialogue can boost critical thinking: Excerpt: “Examining an issue as a debate or dialogue between two sides helps people apply deeper, more sophisticated reasoning …”

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