Connor’s Conundrums » Superfluous Taxation

blog

Superfluous Taxation

Posted by Connor on July 10th, 2006

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

From Sean Hannity’s Let Freedom Ring, pp. 218-219:

“The cost of federal, state and local government in America has exceeded the $3 trillion mark,” wrote economist Steve More in a February 2002 study entitled “The Most Expensive Government in World History.” “Not only does the United States spend more than the entire economy of France, but government spends more money in just a single year than it spent combined from 1781 to 1900, even after adjusting for inflation.”

Moore—one of the brightest and most insightful policy analysts in Washington today—notes that while government consumed about 5 percent of America’s national income during the days of FDR’s New Deal, today it consumes between 20 and 25 percent. Worse, over the course of the next five years, the federal government alone is expected to spend “more money than was spent on World Wars I and II, the Civil War, and the Revolutionary War—even after adjusting for inflation.”

What does that mean in practical terms? Moore puts it this way:

In 1900 total taxes per household were $1,900 (using constant 2000 dollars).

In 1950 total taxes per household were $11,000

In 1999, total taxes per household reached $30,000

Here’s another way of looking at it. According to a report by teh Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation:

In 1900, Tax Freedom Day—the day when Americans have earned enough money to pay off their total tax bill for the year—was January 20.

In 1950, Tax Freedom Day was March 29.

In 1993, the year Bill Clinton and Al Gore took office, Tax Freedom Day was April 20.

In 2000, Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s last year in office, Tax Freedom Day was May 1.

During the Clinton-Gore years, the federal tax burden alone grew by a staggering 45 percent, from an average of $4,625 per perrson to about $6,690.

Moreover, we pay taxes on almost everything we do. There are federal income taxes, Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, corporate taxes, federal airline taxes, gas taxes, cigarette taxes, alcohol taxes, and a dizzying array of excise taxes and fees. As if that weren’t enough, there are state income taxes, local taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, hotel taxes, water taxes, electricity taxes, phone taxes, and on and on. Even when you’re dead, your heirs have to pay the “death tax,” a tax that from its inception has never been anything other than a socialistic measure primarily aimed not at producing revenues but at confiscating private property (a lynchpin of political and economic liberty) and redistributing wealth.