Tax Day

Well it's tax day ... hopefully everyone has their taxes done and filed already. If not, well you'd better hurry it has to be postmarked today. I am assuming that, as usual, the post office will be accepting filings until around mid-night and postmarking them with today's date.

So ... how much did you pay this year?

What is sad is the number of people that will answer that question as 'nothing, I got money back'. Yes, yes, that's nice ... I got a refund too ... but how much did you pay?

People are frikkin clueless. It's like no one pays any attention to it anymore wake up and smell the coffee people, you're being fleeced. You are falling into exactly what the government wants ... they rely on the fact that once you get used to your Net Income that you'll forget about the Gross Income that you actually EARN.

They aren't giving you a refund ... it's not a rebate ... it's your flippin CHANGE. You had a bill (a tax bill but a bill) you over paid they're giving you the remainder of your money ... it's change it may be $10,000 but it's still your change from the bill.

Now ... let me ask you ... if you go to a store and buy a new portable radio (I guess these day's it would be an iPod) that costs $250 and you give the clerk $300 and they give you $50 and someone asks you how much you paid for the radio do you reply 'nothing! I got money back!'? If you do ... you're a moron and need to stop reading now ... you're beyond help.

The problem, of course, is that taxes aren't collected like that .... frankly if they were to do away with withholdings you would have a riot in this country as people realized exactly how much of their money the federal government was confiscating every year.

You see ... even most people that do their own taxes don't pay much attention to that 'Tax Due' amount that is looked up on the tax tables once you jump through all the hoops to figure out what your taxible income is ... all they look at is the total at the bottom of the page telling them if they owe or if they are getting a 'refund' (change). If they're getting a refund they don't care how much was taken ... those that owe may actually shake their heads and bemoan the fact that they have to shell out some of their actual earnings to pay the government ... but still they generally only pay attention to that final number ... not the total tax due.

Yes, I got a refund, no I can't tell you off the top of my head what I paid (nor would I post it here if I could) but I can tell you that it was right around 20% of my earnings for the year (which by definition means that they withheld more than 20% of my income for the year since I got change) ... 1/5th of my income to the government ... and that was after substantial deductions to my income.

What's my incentive to do better and earn more? The only result is that it's going to move me up into a higher tax bracket, meaning that harder work earns me the right to give a larger % of my income to the government..... In fact it's possible for a small increase in income to actually cause you to owe MORE than the actual increase in your income if you were to go from the top of one bracket to the bottom of the next ....

As many of you know ... I support tax reform in the form of the Fair Tax bill (more info at Americans for Fair Taxation). Recently they have been heading up a campaign to send faxes from 100,000 fair tax supporters to thier congressmen by Tax Day ... I am pleased that as of last Wednesday they had sent faxes from 105,000 fair tax supporters to their respective Senators and Represenatives. I am hopeful at least that some represenitives will see that there is serious support for this issue and that as a result that maybe it will get the attention that it deserves.

On top of that the Fair Tax bill in both the House of Represenitives and in the Senate has the greatest support that it has had to date ... including represenitives from both major political parties. The more people that hear about this, the more support that it has gained in the population and the harder it has become for the politicians to ignore.

That said, however, I don't see the bill passing this year ... or likely next year either. This is not an issue that I believe this congress is going to let go through because I feel that there are those elements within both the House and Senate that will bury any meaningful reform in either the tax or social security systems of this country in order to prevent the credit for those reforms being attributed to G.W. Bush or likely any republican president.

In watching the political atmosphere in DC I don't think that much that isn't involved in laying out a timeline for our surrender ... er ... sorry ... I mean withdraw from Iraq (a move that would be a virtual death warrent for the new Iraqi government), further increasing the income tax burden on the 'wealthy' (despite the fact that a majority of people in this country fall into the current definition of 'wealthy' ... and many of them are the first ones to shake their fist and yell 'yeah, tax the rich!' and then wonder why their tax bill went up.), or is otherwise directly harmful to the president or someone in his cabinet is going to see the light of day on the congressional floor until after the 2008 election.

Oddly enough, however, if they continue in this vein I think it runs a good chance of costing them in the 2008 elections because I think the people are paying more attention to these issues than some of the politicians realize.....