Why? Just because we're suffocating beneath an Internal Revenue Code that exceeds seventy thousand pages? Perish the thought (via Newsmax Insider):
"The income tax system in the United States is a sprawling mass of provisions spread across dozens of volumes and has been called everything from a 'disaster' to an 'abomination.'"
That's how the Tax Foundation begins its report "Putting a Face on America's Tax Returns."
The report discloses that it takes Americans up to 7 billion work hours each year to complete the paperwork required by the IRS, and it costs individual and corporate taxpayers more than $165 billion annually to comply with the income tax code.
In 1913, the federal income tax started as four pages of forms and instructions. Today, the tax code spans more than 70,000 pages.
A year before the United States entered World War II, excise taxes on such items as gasoline and cigarettes were the largest source of revenue for the federal government, followed by Social Security payroll taxes, then corporate income taxes.
Today, individual income taxes are the top source of revenue, expected to amount to $1.38 trillion this year, followed by social insurance taxes ($1.02 trillion), corporate income taxes ($380 billion), and excise taxes ($93 billion).
"Contrary to some claims that high-income households are not paying their fair share of income taxes, the average tax rate for the top 1% of earners is actually twice what it is for the rest of Americans," the report states.
"While only about 14% of taxpayers earn more than $100,000, they pay the vast majority of all income taxes in America today."
About half of all tax filers earn less than $30,000 a year — 26% earn less than $15,000, and 21% make between $15,000 and 30,000. Just 3% of filers earn between $200,000 and $499,000, and only 1% make $500,000 or more.
Taxpayers earning less than $100,000 a year account for 18% of all income taxes, while those earning more than $100,000 pay more than 80% of the taxes.
Those earning $1 million or more annually make 11% of all income, but pay 23% of income taxes, while those earning between $200,000 and $1 million account for 17% of income and 32% of income taxes.
Filers making $30,000 or less receive more back from the IRS than they pay in income taxes due to the Earned Income Tax Credit and other preferences. They account for 11% of income and minus-6% of income taxes paid.
Looked at another way, the top 1% of earners pay 37.4% of income taxes, the top 10% pay 70.6%, and the bottom 90% pay 29.4%.
The bottom 20% of earners receive $8.13 in federal spending for every dollar they pay in federal taxes. The top 20% receive $0.25.
The Tax Foundation calls the tax code "steeply progressive and highly redistributive."
That is to say, steeply regressive and highly larcenous. But then how else is a federal government cancerously grown grotesquely beyond its original constitutional limitations to be sustained but by the tripartite thieveries of direct extortion, the robbing of generations yet unborn, and vampiric gang rape of the common currency? Is there anything more comprehensive that robbing Us, The People, of our stores of wealth that the robbers have also made worthless?
Yes, we could use another Ronald Reagan, but could even the Gipper actually resurrect the Old American Republic like Christ did Lazarus? "America, come forth?" Steve Miller seems to think so:
AIG Non-Executive Chairman Steve Miller, who has received the nickname "Mr. Fix It" for stepping in to run distressed companies, thinks the economy could use a dosage of Ronald Reagan as a fix.
After the economic mistakes of President Jimmy Carter, "Reagan came in and did a lot of things, including cutting tax rates—both corporate and personal tax rates—and tried to slow the growth of regulation that was strangling business," Miller tells CNBC.
"I think that . . . would work again now."
Well (pun intended), as the waggish saying goes, "It couldn't hoit". Reagan brought about dramatic reductions in individual income tax rates (from a top rate of 70% when he took office to 28% by 1986). Working with then-Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, they brought Carter's double-digit inflation back from the brink of a Weimarian runaway and wrestled it down under 3% at the cost of the sharp recession that Carter's monetary and fiscal profligacy had only postponed. His across-the-board deregulation unleashed the American economy to new heights of prosperity, producing over twenty million new jobs in his two terms and a generation-long economic boom that the Democrats finally managed to stamp out with their engineered financial panic (the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb) in the fall of 2008 that inflicted upon us Ronald Reagan's true nemesis, Barack Obama.
But all of that was hardly a mere "dosage" for a "fix". Such frivolous terms almost mock the greatness of who that man was and the fundamentally American principles for which he stood. There is a reason, after all, why I, to this day, classify myself as a Reagan, as opposed to Tea Party, conservative. The 40th POTUS believed in and championed every idea that TPers do - patriotism, constitutionalism, capitalism, Judeo-Christianity - but he was also a political realist who didn't let perfection become the enemy of the good, who understood Otto Von Bismarck's adage that "politics is the art of the possible". He never compromised on principle but he was willing to give here and there on details in service to them (e.g. the new income tax rates he agreed to in his 1981 tax cut were a little higher than he had originally proposed, but he didn't let petty stubbornness get in the way of the big picture goal of cutting the damn rates and defibrillating the economy). By such means was he able to win passage of such legislation that was anathema to Democrats through a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. He was positive, upbeat, optimistic (though tough as iron when he had to be) but most importantly, he didn't go out of his way to make enemies, especially in his own party, which was far more "RINOesque" in his day than it is now.
And look at all he accomplished, without even touching upon his rebuilding and revitalization of the U.S. military, leading America to victory in the Cold War without firing a shot, and rekindling of the American spirit.
We don't need a "dosage" of that as a "fix". We need whole body, whole spirit immersion therapy. We need multiple overdoses. We need chronic, serial bingeing on it.
And still I don't think it would be enough to bring the Old American Republic back from the dead.
After all, seen in the overall backdrop of U.S. history, while President Reagan made a huge splash in the river of the country's leftward drift, eventually the ripples diminished, faded, and disappeared, and the leftward drift eventually resumed and worsened. A replay of the Reagan presidency now would have a much smaller impact than it did over thirty years ago. It would also require huge, veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress of not just Republicans, but hardcore constitutionalists, willing to take the steps of which we on the Right have only been able to fantasize: not just cutting individual and corporate tax rates, but replacing the whole damn Internal Revenue Code with a flat tax; repealing ObamaCare, privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; not just deregulation, but abolition of every Cabinet Department that is not constitutionally enumerated as a delegated power by the States to the federal government.
All of that, in turn, would require something else: an electorate that knows, understands, believes in, and is committed to the preservation, protection, defense, and complete restoration to its proper place as "law of the land" of the United States Constitution. Both by their vote and by any alternative means the Constitution provides (i.e. "Republic Review," Article V Convention).
Are we beginning to see the scope of the task in front of us? That it is the work of generations (just as was the "progressive" assault)? And that, even if the country can still be turned around, it is so far gone that we don't have that kind of time? Even with a Reagan-ish reprise in the form of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker?
Jimmy Carter was a fool whose foolishness created "malaise" - and he wasn't re-elected. Barack Obama is an enemy whose Ameriphobic malevolence has created comprehensive disaster, and he's still in power with no end in sight. I respectfully submit that it's going to take more than a change of presidents to "fix" what ails the nation now.
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