Taxes: The Price We Pay for What?

Taxes: The Price We Pay for What?

Just about everyone has always hated what Oliver Wendell Holmes long ago called “the price we pay for civilization,” taxes.

All the phony Washington yammering over billionaire Warren Buffett’s tax rate as opposed to his secretary’s makes as little sense as the president’s foreign policies since taxing every millionaire in the country 100% on their earnings wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans to reduce Obama’s trillion dollar deficits. Still, it’s worthwhile to consider the whole concept of governments siphoning money from its citizens.

The ancient Romans resented paying their precious coppers to the emperor and hid in public urinals to escape the dreaded tax collector, thousands of modern Romans avoid kicking in their euros to support their corrupt leadership, yet most Americans dutifully if not happily file their 1040′s on time every year.

Whether it’s still just the price we pay for civilization or the price the majority of taxpayers pay to keep peace among the underclasses, the price we pay others to pay less as we pay more, or simply the price to insure the government is able to provide cradle to the grave subsidies for those not interested in providing for themselves, is debatable.

What’s not debatable is that good citizens had better pay up by April 17th or be hit with penalties and be hounded to distraction by the American version of the gestapo, the Infernal Revenue Service. This year we have the grace of an additional two days to cough up what we owe instead of paying by the date that fittingly coincides with the fateful day Lincoln died and the Titanic sank to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Sure, federal taxes serve constitutional purposes of providing for the national defense, etc. but the tax code is now larger than the iceberg that sank the Titanic and almost as deadly.

The code, rife with loopholes and exemptions and gifts and penalties, now encompasses over 9 million words requiring more than 90,000 IRS employees to administer it with a budget in excess of $11billion, . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=21585.)