I’d be willing to bet that if you are reading this, and you’re not already retired, you are actually paying income taxes. That’s right, one of the 53% of the nation who’s actually paying into the treasury rather than draining it further (we’re now $18.2 trillion in debt with no end in sight). For those of you who are retired after supporting your family for decades, my beef isn’t with you. About 20% of us are retired and are now drawing social security. In most cases, the income that you receive from Social Security wouldn’t be high enough to reach the threshold of income taxation, so you’re obviously not paying in. Retirees, God bless you for your hard work and dedication over your lifetime. But what about the rest of us?
What is your fair share? It just drives me crazy when a sleazy politician tells me that I’ve not paid my fair share when almost a third of the country lives off the hard work of those who actually produce. Doesn’t the generational welfare recipient receive the same benefits as the hard working taxpaying citizen? Doesn’t the recipient of all the subsidized housing and subsidized child care and subsidized health care get the same police protection, use the same roadways and exist under the same safety provided by our armed services? How can we stand by and allow ourselves to be lectured by scumbag politicians who’ve done nothing but destroy our country with their insane spending and corruption?
Everyone, regardless of your income, should be participating in our Democracy. If you don’t feel the sting of the IRS every paycheck, than you have no reason to pay attention to the folly that is Washington, DC. You have no reason to really care if the government squanders hundreds of billions of dollars annually on INSANE, CORRUPT ?projects? like studying the effects of Swedish massage on rabbits, or how about whether mothers love their kids as much as their dogs? Each of these projects received hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax payer money! Not to mention the tens of billions wasted every year on fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid payments. And the list goes on and on? This is not intentional comedy! Maybe if the 30% of us who never paid income taxes actually cared about where the money went, we might get some sanity.
It seems that a flat tax (apologies to all my accountant friends) would be one solution, but that’s a discussion for another day.