- Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid waste well over $200 billion a year due to wasteful spending, inefficient operations and widespread criminal fraud.
- The IRS admits that it fails to collect over $380 billion a year from tax evaders across the country.
- The President’s own deficit reduction commission identified over $100 billion a year in Defense Department spending that could be eliminated without endangering our national defense.
- This week we have pointed out examples of billions of dollars being wasted in the past few years by many Federal departments including the Navy that spent $300 million dollars on two ships it never used, the State Department that spent $80 million on an Afghan consulate building it will never use, the TSA that has almost $200 million in airport security equipment sitting in warehouses it will never use, etc.
Rather than review some of our past posts as we have done in the five previous parts of this series, consider the PARTIAL list of taxes that Americans pay, as compiled by:
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Show_This_To_Anyone_That_Believes_That_Taxes_Are_Too_Low/22964/0/38/38/Y/M.html
#1 Building Permit Taxes
#2 Capital Gains Taxes
#3 Cigarette Taxes
#4 Court Fines (indirect taxes)
#5 Dog License Taxes
#6 Drivers License Fees (another form of taxation)
#7 Federal Unemployment Taxes
#8 Fishing License Taxes
#9 Food License Taxes
#10 Gasoline Taxes
#11 Gift Taxes
#12 Hunting License Taxes
#13 Inheritance Taxes
#14 Inventory Taxes
#15 IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)
#16 IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
#17 Liquor Taxes
#18 Luxury Taxes
#19 Marriage License Taxes
#20 Medicare Taxes
#21 Medicare Tax Surcharge On High Earning Americans Under Obamacare
#22 Obamacare Individual Mandate Excise Tax (if you don’t buy “qualifying” health insurance under Obamacare you will have to pay an additional tax)
#23 Obamacare Surtax On Investment Income (a new 3.8% surtax on investment income that goes into effect next year)
#24 Property Taxes
#25 Recreational Vehicle Taxes
#26 Toll Booth Taxes
#27 Sales Taxes
#28 Self-Employment Taxes
#29 School Taxes
#30 Septic Permit Taxes
#31 Service Charge Taxes
#32 Social Security Taxes
#33 State Unemployment Taxes (SUTA)
#34 Tanning Tax (a new Obamacare tax on tanning services)
#35 Telephone Federal Excise Taxes
#36 Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Taxes
#37 Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Taxes
#38 Telephone State And Local Taxes
#39 Tire Taxes
#40 Tolls (another form of taxation)
#41 Traffic Fines (indirect taxation)
#42 Utility Taxes
#43 Vehicle Registration Taxes
#44 Workers Compensation Taxes
#45 Federal Income Taxes
#46 State Income Taxes
#47 Local Income Taxes
Granted, not all Americans pay all of these taxes. However, I would bet most Americans pay at least a dozen of them as they go through life. I pay at least twenty of these taxes and I bet you do also.
But the insanity does not stop in just the amount of things we pay taxes on or for. The article from www.blacklisted.com goes on to review some more insanity of our taxation oppression (the link above contains additional links that verify the accuracy of the following assertions):
1. Thanks to Proposition 30, many high income residents of California will be paying marginal income tax rates of 51.9% in 2013 if the fiscal cliff is not avoided. Keep in mind that the 51.9% figure only includes federal and state income taxes. It does not count any of the dozens of other taxes that we pay each year. Thus, some Americans in California will be paying more than half of their income at some point to dysfunction government entities in Sacramento and Washington.
2. If a fiscal cliff deal is not reached, many residents of New York and Hawaii will also be paying marginal income tax rates of more than 50%.
3. If Americans fully funded the government through their taxes without any government borrowing, the average American would have to work for 197 days just to meet the expenses incurred by government. This is not taxation, this really is approaching slavery when you have to work 197 days out of the 250 days a year to pay for government expenses.
4. The U.S. tax code is now 3.8 million words long. If you took all of William Shakespeare’s works and collected them together, the entire collection would only be about 900,000 words long. This is a prime reason why tax evasion is so high, too many loopholes, too much complication.
5. According to the National Taxpayers Union, U.S. taxpayers spend more than 7.6 billion hours complying with Federal tax requirements each year. Imagine what our society would look like if all of that time was spent on more economically profitable activities.
6. 75 years ago, the instructions for Form 1040 were two pages long. Today, they are 189 pages long.
7. There have been 4,428 changes to the tax code over the last decade. This comes out to 1.2 tax changes EVERY DAY for ten straight years. It is incredibly costly to change tax software, tax manuals and tax instruction booklets for all of those changes.
8. According to the National Taxpayers Union, the IRS currently has 1,999 different publications, forms, and instruction sheets that you can download from the IRS website.
9. Our tax system has become so complicated that it is almost impossible to file your taxes correctly. For example, back in 1998 Money Magazine had 46 different tax professionals complete a tax return for a hypothetical household. All 46 of them came up with a different result.
10. In 2009, PC World had five of the most popular tax preparation software websites prepare a tax return for a hypothetical household. All five of them came up with a different result.
11. The IRS spends $2.45 for every $100 that it collects in taxes. That is incredibly inefficient.
12. According to The Tax Foundation, the average American has to work until April 17th just to pay federal, state, and local taxes. Back in 1900, “Tax Freedom Day” came on January 22nd.
13. When the U.S. government first implemented a personal income tax back in 1913, the vast majority of the population paid a rate of just 1 percent, and the highest marginal tax rate was just 7 percent.
14. Residents of New Jersey pay $1.64 in taxes for every $1.00 of federal spending that they get back.
15. The United States is the only nation on the planet that tries to tax citizens on what they earn in foreign countries.
16. According to Forbes, the 400 highest earning Americans pay an average federal income tax rate of just 18 percent.
17. Warren Buffett had an effective federal income tax rate of just 17.4% for 2010.
18. The top 20% of all income earners in the United States pay 86% of all federal income taxes.
19. Sadly, you could take every single penny that every American earns above $250,000 and it would only fund about 38% of the Federal budget.
20. The United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world (35%). In Ireland, the corporate tax rate 12.5%. This is causing thousands of corporations to move operations out of the United States and into other countries.
21. Some tax havens are doing a booming business in setting up sham headquarters for U.S. corporations. For example, the city of Zug, Switzerland only has a population of 26,000 people but it is the headquarters for 30,000 companies.
22. In 1950, corporate taxes accounted for about 30 percent of all federal revenue. In 2012, corporate taxes will account for less than 7 percent of all federal revenue.
23. In a previous article, I discussed how many of our largest corporations make huge profits and yet pay less than nothing in taxes….
What U.S. corporations are able to get away with is absolutely amazing.
The following figures come directly out of a report by Citizens for Tax Justice. These are combined figures for the tax years 2008, 2009 and 2010.
During those three years, all of the corporations below made a lot of money. Yet all of them paid net taxes that were below zero for those three years combined.
How is that possible? Well, it turns out that instead of paying in taxes to the federal government, they were actually getting money back.
So for these corporations, their rate of taxation was actually below zero.
If you have not seen these before, you are going to have a hard time believing some of these statistics…..
*Honeywell*
Profits: $4.9 billion
Taxes: -$34 million
*Fed Ex*
Profits: $3 billion
Taxes: -$23 million
*Wells Fargo*
Profits: $49.37 billion
Taxes: -$681 million
*Boeing*
Profits: $9.7 billion
Taxes: -$178 million
*Verizon*
Profits: $32.5 billion
Taxes: -$951 million
*Dupont*
Profits: $2.1 billion
Taxes -$72 million
*American Electric Power*
Profits: $5.89 billion
Taxes -$545 million
*General Electric*
Profits: $7.7 billion
Taxes: -$4.7 billion
Are you starting to get the picture?
24. Exxon-Mobil paid $15 billion in taxes in 2009, but not a single penny went to the U.S. government.
25. If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.
26. The number of traffic accidents spikes each year right around April 15th. The following is from a recent Bloomberg article….
Deaths from traffic accidents around April 15, traditionally the last day to file individual income taxes in the U.S., rose 6 percent on average on each of the last 30 years of tax filing days compared with a day during the week prior and a week later, according to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
27. The elite are not stupid. They are not just going to sit there and let our politicians tax them into oblivion. In fact, many of them will openly cheat if that is what it takes to avoid taxes. Most of them have become masters at avoiding taxes or they have hired people that do that kind of work for them. According to the IMF, the global elite are holding a total of 18 trillion dollars in offshore banking havens such as the Cayman Islands.
28. It has been reported that 80 percent of all international banking transactions involve offshore banks. A whopping1.4 trillion dollars is being held in offshore banks in the Cayman Islands alone.
29. An article that appeared in the Guardian estimated that a third of all the wealth on the entire planet is being kept in offshore banks. One of the primary reasons for this is tax avoidance.
30. If a deal is not reached and the “fiscal cliff” is not avoided, the average American taxpayer can expect to pay about $3,500 more in taxes next year.
Too many taxes, too many tax evaders, too little benefit from government services. No matter how much Obama taxes the rich, it will be a drop in the bucket relative to our annual deficit spending and our overwhelming national debt.
THE GOVERNMENT AND THE POLITICIANS THAT OPERATE IT SPEND AND WASTE TOO MUCH OF TAXPAYER WEALTH. We have a government out of control problem, not an under taxation problem. We have pointed out in the past, that even if you taxed millionaire earners in this country at 100%, you would not come close to eliminating Obama’s annual deficit spending never mind making a dent in the national debt.
Why? Because according to recent IRS data, there are only about 239,000 Americans earning over a million dollars a year. They comprise only about .14% of all income tax filers in the country.
We have pointed out in the pass that even if the government confiscated and monetized the total wealth, not income, of the richest people in this country, you would not come close to funding one year’s worth of Federal government operations and less than 15% of the national debt. You cannot fix this country by raising taxes, only by drastically reducing spending.
And Friday we will show you how to do that. We have found a way, leveraging the work of some very smart Americans, to take $9 TRILLION out of our national debt over the next ten years with relatively little pain to most Americans. It is relatively easy to do since most of the analytical work has already been done. Just seems that our political class is not capable of understanding basic math and basic logic.
I leave you today with these parting, and oh so true words: “The politicians don't just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless. When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.” James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union
Dozens of taxation processes, over 50% marginal tax rates, $16.3 TRILLION in crushing debt, billions of dollars wasted every day, divisive class warfare, tax freedom days that get longer and longer, gross tax evasions, all to fund a dsyfuncitonal government. "Soul crushing" sounds about right with President Obama the lead soul crusher.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
www.loathemygovernment.com
It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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