Mayor on Tax Day 2013: We Cannot Tax Ourselves Enough to Maintain Federal Spending Levels

Welcome to Tax Day 2013. 

Was it Mark Twain who said, “There are two sure things in this life: death and taxes?”

Let start with the premise, no one likes to pay taxes. Taxes are the necessary inconveniences which supports the services your government provides. In our country at the federal level, we have a progressive tax on the income a person receives. If you make a lot of money, you pay a lot of federal income taxes. On the other hand, if you make little money, you pay less. 

We are to the point in the United States that about 50 percent of our citizens pay taxes to support federal services for 100 percent of our citizens and residents. Some kinds of income are treated differently from other. Some incomes have special tax treatments. In a very general sense, those income sources that receive special tax treatment have to do with investments that encourage job creation and economic development. That kind of income is frequently tied to those who are “rich” and have some portion of total income available for investment opportunities. 

So a discussion of taxes (who has to pay, how and why) in the United States has to start somewhere with definitions of what is income, why is some treated differently from other income sources, in our current system, what is “rich” and what should the progressive bracket levels be, why is it that we look down on those who make a lot of money, and why do some citizens pay nothing to support the federal government services?

Obviously, a country based on a Ponzi scheme tax structure and thousands of pages of regulation, that takes two Philadelphia lawyers to guess at what the correct tax treatment is for any item on the tax return, isn’t long for this world. For illustrative purposes, the USSR ceased to exist because in the grand scheme of things defensive, the United States forced the USSR to spend itself out of existence.

Will there be further discussion about how to tax for federal purposes? The answer is there must be. We cannot, as a country, tax ourselves enough to continue spending at the current and future expected levels. Remember, the USSR.

For right here and now if you haven’t been able to file your federal/state taxes, there is still time to file for an extension. This extension isn’t for paying the taxes (you have to send money with the extension form to pay what you expect your 2013 taxes to be), but only for filing the tax return that you must file.

Do you believe the U.S.A. could tax itself to the point of economic collapse? Let us know in the comments.

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