National Review article about tax code

[death dealer]

April 10, 2010 7:00 A.M.

Tax Season

For an increasing number of Americans, tax season is like baseball season: It’s a spectator sport.

We are nearing the climax of “tax season.” That’s the problem right there, by the way: Summer should have a season, and baseball should have a season, but not tax. Happily, like candy canes and Christmas-tree lights on December 26th, the TurboTax boxes will soon be disappearing from the display racks until the nights start drawing in and the leaves fall from the trees and tax season begins anew in seven or eight months’ time.

And yet for an increasing number of Americans, tax season is like baseball season: It’s a spectator sport. According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009, 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax. Obviously, many of them pay other kinds of taxes — state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why). Half a decade back, it was just under 40 percent who paid no federal income tax; now it’s just under 50 percent. By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury. In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from “No taxation without representation” to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, and bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers contribute 60 percent of revenue. The top 10 percent provide 75 percent. Another 40-odd percent make up the rest. And half are exempt. This isn’t redistribution — a “leveling” to address the “maldistribution” of income, as Sen. Max Baucus (D., Kleptocristan) put it the other day. It isn’t even “spreading the wealth around,” as then-senator Obama put it in an unfortunate off-the-prompter moment during the 2008 campaign. Rather, it’s an assault on the moral legitimacy of the system. If you accept the principle of a tax on income, it might seem reasonable to exclude the very poor from having to contribute to it. But in no meaningful sense of the term can half the country be considered “poor.” United States income tax is becoming the 21st-century equivalent of the “jizya” — the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens: In return for funding the Islamic imperium, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Likewise, under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the non-believers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity, and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.

In the Islamic world, the infidel tax base eventually wised up. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian tradesmen got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills far from the shakedown crowd. In less mountainous terrain where it’s harder to lie low, non-Muslims found it easier to convert. That’s partly what drove Islamic expansion. Once Araby was all Muslim, it was necessary to move on to the Levant, and to Persia, and to Central Asia and North Africa and India and Europe — in search of new infidels to mug. Don’t worry, I’m not so invested in my analogy that I’m suggesting the Obama-Reid-Pelosi shakedown racket will be forced to invade Canada and Scandinavia. For one thing, pretty much everywhere else got with the Big Government program well ahead of America and long ago figured out all the angles: Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole. In the Stockholm suburb of Tensta, 20 percent of women in their late 40s collect disability benefits. In the United Kingdom, 5 million people — a tenth of the adult population — have not done a day’s work since the New Labour government took office in 1997.

America has a ways to go in catching up with those enlightened jurisdictions, but it’s on its way. Rep. Paul Ryan pointed out recently that, by 2004, 20 percent of U.S. households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government. As a matter of practical politics, how receptive would they be to a pitch for lower taxes, which they don’t pay, or lower government spending, of which they are such fortunate beneficiaries? How receptive would another fifth of households, who receive about 40 percent of their income from federal programs, be to such a pitch?

And what’s to stop this trend? Democracy decays easily into the tyranny of the majority, in which 51 percent of voters can empty the pockets of the other 49 percent. That’s why a country on the fast track to a $20 trillion national debt exempts half the population from making even a modest contribution to reducing it. And it’s also why the remorseless shriveling of the tax rolls is a cancer at the heart of republican citizenship.

Pace Max Baucus, this isn’t about correcting the “maldistribution” of income. What Mal Max is up to is increasing dependency. In the newspeak of Big Government, “tax cuts” now invariably mean not reductions in the rate of income seizure but a “tax credit” reimbursed from the seizure in return for living your life the way the government wants you to. With Obamacare, we’ve now advanced to the next stage — “tax debits,” or additional punitive confiscation if you decline to live your life in accordance with government fiat. Obamacare requires you upon penalty of law to make provisions for your health care that meet the approval of the state commissars. Unfortunately, as they discovered after passing it, the bill didn’t provide for any enforcement mechanisms. But not to worry. The other day Douglas Shulman, commissioner for the Internal Revenue Service, announced that, if you fail to purchase the mandated health insurance, he’ll simply confiscate any tax refund due to you from your previous twelve months’ employment withholding.

We are now not merely disincentivizing economic energy but actively waging war on it. If 51 percent can vote themselves government lollipops from the other 49 percent, soon 60 percent will be shaking down the remaining 40 percent, and then 70 percent will be sticking it to the remaining 30 percent. How low can it go? When you think about it, that 53 percent of American households props up not just this country but half the planet: They effectively pick up the defense tab for our wealthiest allies, so that Germany, Japan, and others can maintain minimal militaries and lavish the savings on cradle-to-grave entitlements. A relatively tiny group of people is writing the check for the entire global order. What proportion of them would need to figure out that the game’s no longer worth it to bring the whole system crashing down?

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2010 Mark Steyn.

[AZGrizFan]

But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why). Half a decade back, it was just under 40 percent who paid no federal income tax; now it’s just under 50 percent. By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury. In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from “No taxation without representation” to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, and bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers contribute 60 percent of revenue. The top 10 percent provide 75 percent. Another 40-odd percent make up the rest. And half are exempt. This isn’t redistribution — a “leveling” to address the “maldistribution” of income, as Sen. Max Baucus (D., Kleptocristan) put it the other day. It isn’t even “spreading the wealth around,” as then-senator Obama put it in an unfortunate off-the-prompter moment during the 2008 campaign. Rather, it’s an assault on the moral legitimacy of the system. If you accept the principle of a tax on income, it might seem reasonable to exclude the very poor from having to contribute to it. But in no meaningful sense of the term can half the country be considered “poor.”

America has a ways to go in catching up with those enlightened jurisdictions, but it’s on its way. Rep. Paul Ryan pointed out recently that, by 2004, 20 percent of U.S. households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government. As a matter of practical politics, how receptive would they be to a pitch for lower taxes, which they don’t pay, or lower government spending, of which they are such fortunate beneficiaries? How receptive would another fifth of households, who receive about 40 percent of their income from federal programs, be to such a pitch?

We are now not merely disincentivizing economic energy but actively waging war on it. If 51 percent can vote themselves government lollipops from the other 49 percent, soon 60 percent will be shaking down the remaining 40 percent, and then 70 percent will be sticking it to the remaining 30 percent. How low can it go? When you think about it, that 53 percent of American households props up not just this country but half the planet: They effectively pick up the defense tab for our wealthiest allies, so that Germany, Japan, and others can maintain minimal militaries and lavish the savings on cradle-to-grave entitlements. A relatively tiny group of people is writing the check for the entire global order. What proportion of them would need to figure out that the game’s no longer worth it to bring the whole system crashing down?
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2010 Mark Steyn.

Mark Steyn for president. Someone who actually GETS it.

This globe is in for a rude awakening.

[AZGrizFan]

20% of households get 75% OF THEIR INCOME FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!!!

Donks, you are fucking pathetic.

[AZGrizFan]

And yet for an increasing number of Americans, tax season is like baseball season: It’s a spectator sport. According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009, 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax. Obviously, many of them pay other kinds of taxes — state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why). Half a decade back, it was just under 40 percent who paid no federal income tax; now it’s just under 50 percent. By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers contribute 60 percent of revenue. The top 10 percent provide 75 percent. Another 40-odd percent make up the rest. And half are exempt. This isn’t redistribution — a “leveling” to address the “maldistribution” of income, as Sen. Max Baucus (D., Kleptocristan) put it the other day. It isn’t even “spreading the wealth around,” as then-senator Obama put it in an unfortunate off-the-prompter moment during the 2008 campaign. Rather, it’s an assault on the moral legitimacy of the system.

America has a ways to go in catching up with those enlightened jurisdictions, but it’s on its way. Rep. Paul Ryan pointed out recently that, by 2004, 20 percent of U.S. households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government. As a matter of practical politics, how receptive would they be to a pitch for lower taxes, which they don’t pay, or lower government spending, of which they are such fortunate beneficiaries? How receptive would another fifth of households, who receive about 40 percent of their income from federal programs, be to such a pitch?

From KYJelly's signature:

"It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."
-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Mission fucking accomplished, you douchebag.

[Baldy]

Mark Steyn for president. Someone who actually GETS it.

This globe is in for a rude awakening.

I wish, but Steyn is Canadian.

Plus America Alone was a GREAT book. I highly recommend it to everyone.
It paints a very clear perspective of Islamic fundamentalism and what it has done to Europe and what it is doing to the US.

[AZGrizFan]

Mark Steyn for president. Someone who actually GETS it.

This globe is in for a rude awakening.

I wish, but Steyn is Canadian.

Plus America Alone was a GREAT book. I highly recommend it to everyone.
It paints a very clear perspective of Islamic fundamentalism and what it has done to Europe and what it is doing to the US.

So? If an African can become president, why not a Canadian?

[Baldy]

I wish, but Steyn is Canadian.

Plus America Alone was a GREAT book. I highly recommend it to everyone.
It paints a very clear perspective of Islamic fundamentalism and what it has done to Europe and what it is doing to the US.

So? If an African can become president, why not a Canadian?

Good point.

[AZGrizFan]

BTW, anybody think of a quick way to fact-check his statements regarding the % of households that get the majority of their income from the government? Because if those numbers are even remotely close, houndawg, dbackjon, kyjelly and their ilk can shove Obama, Baucus and this socialist government up their ass. I've been making those assertions for months and they keep opening their big yappers claiming it's not true.

Fuck you all!

[death dealer]

BTW, anybody think of a quick way to fact-check his statements regarding the % of households that get the majority of their income from the government? Because if those numbers are even remotely close, houndawg, dbackjon, kyjelly and their ilk can shove Obama, Baucus and this socialist government up their ass. I've been making those assertions for months and they keep opening their big yappers claiming it's not true.

Fuck you all!

AZ, it's the National Review. They don't just publish shit without fact-checking it first. This isn't some fucking hack job blogosphere crap like the Daily Kos!

[AZGrizFan]

BTW, anybody think of a quick way to fact-check his statements regarding the % of households that get the majority of their income from the government? Because if those numbers are even remotely close, houndawg, dbackjon, kyjelly and their ilk can shove Obama, Baucus and this socialist government up their ass. I've been making those assertions for months and they keep opening their big yappers claiming it's not true.

Fuck you all!

AZ, it's the National Review. They don't just publish shit without fact-checking it first. This isn't some fucking hack job blogosphere crap like the Daily Kos!

I know, just firing that salvo before KY Jelly comes in here blathering on and on about the "source".

[native]

BTW, anybody think of a quick way to fact-check his statements regarding the % of households that get the majority of their income from the government? Because if those numbers are even remotely close, houndawg, dbackjon, kyjelly and their ilk can shove Obama, Baucus and this socialist government up their ass. I've been making those assertions for months and they keep opening their big yappers claiming it's not true.

**** you all!

Do you think the "ilk" really believe their own disinformation, or are they intentionally lying?

[death dealer]

AZ, it's the National Review. They don't just publish shit without fact-checking it first. This isn't some fucking hack job blogosphere crap like the Daily Kos!

I know, just firing that salvo before KY Jelly comes in here blathering on and on about the "source".

Oh, don't worry, I know you know. Those rolling eyes weren't for you. If they are so fucking eager to know his sources, I'm sure they can pull the article and get the sources themselves. I'm not doing their damn homework for them. Fucking A.

[ALPHAGRIZ1]

Those idiots can spin all they want, they will just continue their unparalleled streak of being wrong.

We need to tax the poor. If your going to get everything for "free" you might as well pay for it like the rest of us do.

[blueballs]

http://www.fairtax.org

[ASUMountaineer]

http://www.fairtax.org

[Col Hogan]

Good article...

but nothing from the left???

[AZGrizFan]

Good article...

but nothing from the left???

They're too busy gutting the treasury and jackstomping anyone who makes over $65,000/year.

[ALPHAGRIZ1]

They are generally very quiet when it comes to facts.

[Grizalltheway]

I only have one question: do you guys really believe that any of this will change the next time a Republican is elected?

[OL FU]

Not that it doesn't occur in other tax brackets, but fraud runs rampant with respect to the earned income credit. Swapping dependants, married couple filing seperate under head of household status, etc. And then you have the issue of these welfare payments going to people with lots of non-taxable income. A specific example of my ex receiving $2500 a month from me in child support plus earning $25,000 a year and receiving a tax refund from the government in excess of what she paid in due to the child tax credit and earned income calculation.

don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to welfare but let's call it what it is (which of course would make it politically unpopular) instead of calling it a tax refund (which in many cases is what it isn't). At least under the welfare system, with all of its fraud, an attempt was made to justify the payments.

[AZGrizFan]

I only have one question: do you guys really believe that any of this will change the next time a Republican is elected?

You know what? You're right.....nothing will change.

Let's all just lay back while they fuck us in the ass with no vaseline....

[Skjellyfetti]

20% of households get 75% OF THEIR INCOME FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!!!

Donks, you are **** pathetic.

I don't see why that is so shocking or bad.

~1.5 million active soldiers probably make up a significant chunk of that.

[AZGrizFan]

20% of households get 75% OF THEIR INCOME FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!!!

Donks, you are **** pathetic.

I don't see why that is so shocking or bad.

~1.5 million active soldiers probably makes up the largest chunk of that.

And THAT'S what's so shocking. Than an AMERICAN could see that statistic and have no problem with it. Unless, of course, you're one of that 20%.

Per US Census Bureau, circa 2008:

# Households in USA: 105,480,101
20% of that # = 21,096,020

You STILL think the 1,200,000 (not 1.5 million) soldiers/sailors/marines make up "the largest chunk of that"?

[Grizalltheway]

I only have one question: do you guys really believe that any of this will change the next time a Republican is elected?

You know what? You're right.....nothing will change.

Let's all just lay back while they fuck us in the ass with no vaseline....

You can do whatever you want to try and change the situation, but voting for people like McCain certainly isn't going to do jack shit.

[JMU DJ]

20% of households get 75% OF THEIR INCOME FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!!!

Donks, you are **** pathetic.

I don't see why that is so shocking or bad.

~1.5 million active soldiers probably make up a significant chunk of that.

I didn't think about that, I wonder if they used soldiers, other government employees and those being paid with federal funds to calculate that statistic. If so, I guess I'm part of the 20% as I get paid from a federally funded research grant. Hey Col, aren't you paid privately through the Gubernment too?