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| Losing Faith in the Feds | | Print | |
| Written by Ralph R. Reiland | ||||||||||
| Monday, 08 March 2010 11:50 | ||||||||||
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“Fifty-six percent of people questioned say they think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens,” explained CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser. By party and ideology, a clear partisan divide was evident in the replies to the survey. Nearly 7 in 10 Republicans and 63 percent of Independents said that the federal government poses a threat to the rights of Americans, while only 37 percent of Democrats held that opinion regarding government (CNN didn’t say what percent of Democrats are dependent on government checks for their basic sustenance, either via welfare or pensions or by way of paychecks for purportedly being “public servants”). For the upcoming November elections, that means that the majority of Democrats are fundamentally out of step with a country that’s increasing sounding like Patrick Henry and Paul Revere. We know what happened the last time a critical mass of self-reliant and independent people in this part of the world decided that the government was a threat to their right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness: “That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” The King, with “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states,” had “erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” What were taxes at the time, in 1776? “English taxes were in the range of 1 percent of income in most colonies, and possibly as high as 2.5 percent in the plantation colonies,” writes author Gary North. “For this, they went to war.” Today, reports the Tax Foundation, “Americans pay more in taxes than they spend on food, clothing and housing combined.” On average, taxes ate up every cent we earned last year from January 1 through April 13, according to the Tax Foundation’s analysis: “Tax Freedom Day answers the basic question, ‘What price is the nation paying for government?’ An official government figure for total tax collections is divided by the nation’s total income. The answer last year is that taxes amounted to 28.2 percent of our income, and the stretch of 103 days from January 1 to April 13 is 28.2 percent of the year.” Add last year’s unprecedented federal budget deficit to the total taxes collected and the cost of government moves to May 29. That’s 41 percent of our total income to pay the price of government. Thomas Jefferson thought it was time to grab the muskets off the wall at 1 percent. New York Times columnist Frank Rich isn’t happy about any of this unruly talk. He recently wrote that the guy who crashed the plane into the IRS offices in Austin sounded like a Tea Partier, and that the “Tea Party favorite for governor of Texas,” Debra Medina, “reminded those at a rally that ‘the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.’ ” Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh. Trackback(0)
Comments (6)
study up
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“The majority of Americans say the government poses an immediate threat to individual rights and freedoms,” stated CNN, summarizing the results of a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll.
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Unfortunately, the problem is really far worse than this Tax figures such as those of the Tax Foundation ignore many key taxes: inflation (the printing or creation of new money, which thereby destroys the buying power of the dollar); local, state, and federal fees (such as licensing costs); and regulatory burdens (such as environmental regulations. To better take into account the full tax burden placed on citizens in each country, we should divide total government spending by total personal income as derived from census information, not as figured out from government calculations. Why should we do this? Several reasons come to mind: a population's median income is only very weakly correlated to its country's GDP so government calculations of personal income that are based off GDP (as are the Tax Foundation's figures), as well as tax rates that are figured as a percentage of GDP, make little sense; our country's GDP is usually overstated because government tends to count companies' foreign-made products by mistake and include it as part of America's GDP; and governments often spend more than they collect in taxes through either creating money (inflation) or borrowing money (slightly delayed inflation). |
study up
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part 2 Inflation causes the price of goods to rise in an economy. In the United States, past government printing of money and increased energy costs (greatly caused by government regulations — a hidden tax) caused food prices to increase from $706.80 to $967.90 per month between August 2000 and August 2008 for a moderate spending family of four. Also, government pays only a fraction of the actual cost of care for Medicare and Medicaid patients, so that doctors must make up for the losses they incur by passing those costs on to patients with health insurance (yet another hidden tax, a huge one since government purports to be responsible for such a large amount of medical care. The United States tax rate is at minimum 20 percent greater than the Tax Foundation shows it to be. In 2007, even without figuring the cost of the government in medical and environmental regulations the U.S. tax rate was 62.1 percent. We divide U.S. government spending in 2007 ($4.9041 trillion)21 by the total personal income as derived from the U.S. Census' 2007 Current Population Survey ($7.8955 trillion)18 and get a tax rate of 62.1 percent. |
OoLaLaFrenchGirl
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Options? So, we are aware of the problem. Now, what are we going to do about it! |
Lee Gonzales
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French girl asks what can we do? http://www.votervoice.net/Core...s:APP=GAC$ Write your congressman and tell him to repeal the Patriot Act. It's very easy to do something "about it." Go to this link above. Or, here: http://www.jbs.org/ On the menu bar is an "ACTION" tab, ,click on legislative action. Scroll to Repeal the Patriot Act and fill in the boxes and hit send.compose a short letter. It will go immediately to 3 of your congressmen (two US senators and one Representative. Call them or visit them. Get on your congressman and senators mailing list and they'll notify you of their "townhall meeting" and telephone conference "town halls." Do something. |
Fallon
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... Unfortunately, Texans were swayed by the crying clown, rather than an honest evaluation of Medina's positions. Perry claimed a narrowest-of-margins victory in a primary where the final day of early voting was tossed out without adequate explanation. We may actually have put forward a candidate who sought a return to Constitutional governance; but, if we did, we failed to make it a resounding, and therefore undeniable, victory. At present, Perry is loathed by a very large segment of Texans. Not a very advantageous position to start a general campaign against a man of humble demeanor and a genuine smile. Since both appear to play the same parsing game ... "The Trans Texas Corridor is dead.", which, being explained, actually means "The NAME, Trans Texas Corridor, is dead." the possibility that this could become a three-way race if another Constitutionalist steps into the ring (Medina cannot, having already run in the Republican Primary) is actually very real. Perry's hopes for POTUS may dash before he can whoop out more "dashings" himself. His people at Clear Channel played this one like a hybrid of Rahm and LBJ...that didn't go un-noticed. It likely could go unforgiven. |
