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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Jonah Goldberg
Congratulations! April 9th was your last day working for the man -- at least for this year. The Tax Foundation calculates that Tax Freedom Day for 2010 is April 9, which means that Americans spent nearly 100 days working just to pay their taxes. If Democrats have their way, Tax Freedom Day will keep getting later and later.
Hold that thought. Imagine for a moment that Tax Freedom Day was Dec. 31. In other words, picture working 365 days a year for the government. Now, the government would "give" you a place to sleep, food to eat and clothes to wear, but all your income would really be Washington's income to allocate as it saw fit. Some romantics might call this sort of arrangement "socialism" or "communism." But another perfectly good word for it is "slavery," or, if you prefer, involuntary servitude.
No one is proposing any such arrangement. But it's an important point conceptually. A 100 percent tax rate would be tyrannical not just because you have a right to own what you create, but because the government would necessarily decide what you can and can't have. Reasonable people can of course differ about where a tax rate becomes tyrannical, and we're far from that line in historical terms. But any amount of taxation can be unjust if it is being used for bad reasons, is applied discriminatorily or if it's taken without representation. (That's how the American Revolution started, after all.)
Individual liberty is far from the only concern, either. The kind of country we want to be is deeply bound up in taxation.
Only after they passed "ObamaCare" did Democrats clarify that this was one of their motives. ObamaCare's appeal has less to do with saving money -- which it won't do -- and more to do with spreading the wealth around.
Of course, this will fuel the national debt, which has soared on both parties' watches (
There's also the simple fact that taxes impede growth, and low economic growth curtails the pursuit of happiness for everyone. Democrats are increasingly skeptical about this transcendently obvious point because they have convinced themselves that since government is better than the private sector when it comes to spending money wisely, it only makes sense to take money from the dumb private sector and let the smart government sector decide what to do with it. Well, no matter how dumb America's wealth-creators might be, they're smart enough to respond to incentives and disincentives. Indeed, since 1950, no matter where their tax rates have been, from as low as 28 percent to as high as 91 percent, the government's take has held at about 19.5 percent of GDP, suggesting that squeezing taxpayers harder doesn't necessarily yield more juice.
Personally, I have never understood liberalism's blind spot for liberty when it comes to taxation. A 24-hour waiting period before a teenager can have an abortion is an allegedly grotesque violation of individual freedom, but a federal government that takes vast amounts of your money -- the means by which you exercise your every freedom -- to distribute as it sees fit is "progressive"? The USA Patriot Act, whose threat to privacy was somewhere between entirely theoretical and nonexistent for the overwhelming majority of Americans, shocked the liberal conscience. But our income tax system -- made idiotically complex by both parties -- that demands countless hours of preparation and requires law-abiding citizens to reveal (and document!) many of their most private decisions to government inspectors every year is "reasonable." Yet many liberals even think complaining about this is a sign of right-wing dementia.
Now, under ObamaCare, the
I bring this up because many in the
Available at Amazon.com:
Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House
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