Shot in the Dark

Religious Holiday

It’s time we observe the “progressive” movement’s foremost religious holiday, Tax Day!

It’s more than just the day the commoner pays obeisance to the debt we all owe Government.  No – Tax Day is a ritualized sacrifice of the fruit of our labor, combined with the symbolic gesture of giving control of one’s livelihood and destiny to (what the left believes is) something bigger and better than mere people.  Something that, though we and our aspirations may die, lives on, bigger and better than the sum of its parts.

So happy Tax Day, “progressives”!

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Mitch Berg

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11 responses to “Religious Holiday”

  1. TheFedSucks Avatar
    TheFedSucks

    Excess government force deployed via Alinsky tactics. Elections. Idiocy.

    Waste, fraud, and abuse.

    Rent seeking and graft.

  2. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    Hmmm… You just described slavery.

  3. bosshoss429 Avatar
    bosshoss429

    The Federal Income tax system, along with its’ complicated and convoluted rules, brought to you by the Commiecrat party!

  4. Emery Avatar
    Emery

    The tax code is written by Congress.

  5. Emery Avatar
    Emery

    Zero out corporate taxes and capital gains taxes, yes, but tax all increases in retained earnings (profits less investment before dividends), as normal income for the shareholders. This will be a tremendous incentive to stop corporations from hording piles of cash, which benefits management rather than shareholders. This will in effect tax corporate profits at the top marginal rate, but by avoiding double taxation lower taxes will be paid by corporations. Every corporation could be forced to pay a minimum dividend equal to the top marginal tax rate.

    Ditch the regular income tax, keep the alternative minimum tax (which has very little complexity), and add a VAT. In the process we would lose the home mortgage interest deduction and the health care expense deduction which are the most unfair and distorting parts of the current tax code. The Fair tax people suggest that you deal with poverty by giving everyone a rebate every month based on what they would pay in VAT if they earned at the poverty line. Sounds good to me. We can keep the AMT as a wealth tax for the truly rich.

  6. Powhatan Mingo Avatar
    Powhatan Mingo

    http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2547245
    This project is going nowhere and is spending about a million dollars a year in featherbed jobs.
    A million dollars is far more than I will pay in federal income taxes in my life.

  7. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Emery, technically the tax laws are written by Congress, but the law is codified by the IRS. There is an article today on Fox that notes that the IRS is considering taxing meals and gym memberships provided by companies. Now yes, it’s income, yes, it may indeed be authorized by the law Congress passed, but the simple fact is that the code is being written not by Congress, but by the IRS.

    And for that matter, I have personally seen examples where bureaucracies have gone well beyond the law in writing code; my example is where the USDA, absent any authorization in the law (I looked it up), demanded that those buying crop insurance provide the Social Security numbers of their spouses whether or not they were involved in the operation.

    I wasn’t ready to sue, so I dropped it, but if you think tax and other codes are written by Congress, dream on. They are written by agencies.

  8. Bill C Avatar
    Bill C

    I think income taxes should also be paid on government entitlements (welfare, section 8, food stamps, etc…not SS…that’s already been taxed)

    In a just world, withholdings would also go away. That would create instant revolt and end the income tax no later than May 15th.

    And whether or not it is De Tocqueville, or Tytler or whoever, nothing will change until everyone has an iron in the fire:

    http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville

    “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

    This is a variant expression of a sentiment which is often attributed to Tocqueville or Alexander Fraser Tytler, but the earliest known occurrence is as an unsourced attribution to Tytler in “This is the Hard Core of Freedom” by Elmer T. Peterson in The Daily Oklahoman (9 December 1951): “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”

  9. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    One possibility that I’d like to see discussed, regarding the tax code, is the possibility of a tonnage tax on fossil fuels combined with a defunding of almost all DOE initiatives. It’s been 37 years, and the total number of profitable energy sources they’ve developed is still….zero. Not solar, not wind, not biomass, nothing. So it’s time to entertain the notion that this is something that government doesn’t do well.

    Assess $20/ton on all fuels–including a tonnage tax on imported goods to reflect the energy used to make them (say $80/ton for most things, $200/ton for electronics), cut $40 billion in DOE spending, and (2.4e9 tons of fossil fuels used in the U.S. in 2013 according to EIA) then collect $50 billion in direct taxes on the fuels used (or less as people have an incentive to be efficient) plus a certain amount on imported goods. $100 billion impact total, split the difference in tax cuts and deficit reduction. Tax cuts by increasing the deduction for each dependent, making a lot of the mess in our tax code irrelevant.

  10. Emery Incognito Avatar
    Emery Incognito

    Flat taxes and means-tested benefits are much more efficient than ‘progressive’ taxes and universal benefits for several reasons, one of them being the increased incentive to avoid high income and wealth tax rates for the wealthy. But progressive politicians like progressive taxes because it makes them seem so progressive, even when progressive is just plain stupid. If fighting the class war is what got you elected, you can hardly tax everybody the same once you’re in office.

  11. swiftee Avatar
    swiftee

    “Zero out corporate taxes and capital gains taxes, yes, but tax all increases in retained earnings (profits less investment before dividends), as normal income for the shareholders. This will be a tremendous incentive to stop corporations from hording piles of cash, which benefits management rather than shareholders.”

    Of course Emery plagiarized this: http://www.allthingsnow.com/day/finance/shared/17114087/Daily+chart%3A+Tax+me+if+you+can+%7C+The+Economist

    Emery’s childhood must have been one ugly circus.

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