My friend really wanted to repost a rant I put on FB, so here it be with some of the spelling fixed, but no other changes:
Ok, gang, there's a lot of talk about how 15% isn't enough to pay for taxes. Here's my 2 cents. The reason that capitol gains tax is lower is because you've already paid taxes on that money as income. I'm not sure it's cool to keep adding taxes and more taxes to that same dollar. For instance. Let's say I make a dollar for a job I do. I'm probably paying 30% or more (if I'm like Mitt Romney ...and am worth a quarter of a billion). So that leaves me .70. Then there's inflation, which tends to be about 3% (I think) per year. So that's a hidden tax that the Fed printing more money to cover govt. debts, so it's still money the govt. gets ultimately. So that leaves me 67 cents. Then let's take local taxes of a conservative 10%, so that leaves me .57. If I buy a car or a house or whatever with that money, let's take out another 7 cents just to give us a nice round number, so we're down to .50. Do you have to pay taxes on things like food? Take that out too. So before I pay for groceries, etc, I've already given the govt. about half of my money. So let's say I manage to actually SAVE half of that. Totally unreasonable, but let's say I can save .25 out of every dollar I initially earn. Again, this is totally unrealistic. Lets say my investments keep up with the market (S&P), which averages about 8% every year. You're saying that giving up 15% of that is not enough? Folks have already paid about half of what they earn to the govt and you're telling me that hitting them for an additional 30% of whatever they earn on the interest on what they manage to save is reasonable?
Folks, we didn't even have a peace-time income tax until 1894 and then it only affected the top 10% of earners. Then in 1913, income taxes finally became a constitutional amendment. Since then its been all downhill and the tax code has grown to employ over 90 thousand (!) IRS workers which has an annual operating budget of over 11 BILLION dollars a year. To put the code into perspective, the bible has about 770,000 words. the tax code has well over 9,000,000 words! Who is actually going to read that crap? Not me! It has been estimated that it would take an average reader over 300 hours a year to read the tax code because it is ever changing, and that's assuming you understand it. But the lawyers that work for that famous 1% probably know it really well. Want justice? Want to make the playing field more "fair?" The tax code should be cut to the bare minimum and that means that it should be something we can all read and understand. No more lobbyists should affect the code and be able to add their cryptic 30 pages here and there to help buy an election. Then maybe the little guy and the middle class will be able to determine what is and isn't "fair" for themselves.
