What's Yours is Mine

The National Taxpayers Union provides an analysis of IRS data displaying taxes paid by income level in the US. Please go to http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=6 to see this analysis for the years 1999 to 2007.

In 2007, 70% of the federal personal taxes were paid by 10% of the taxpayers (voters). Or, to look at it from the other side, 90% of the taxpayers (voters) paid only 30% of the taxes. What are the implications of this imbalance in taxes paid/benefits received? What would the natural result be of a one-man, one-vote democracy where the vast majority of the voters can vote for candidates who will establish laws and rules and spending priorities and government distributions which take money from a few and distribute it to those who voted for them after scalping a nice vig for themselves?

Does the USConstitution support a political system based on democratic majorities that de facto legalize a “Robin Hood” form of taxation and redistribution?

It may well be that the current coalition of virtually all black Americans, a majority of Hispanic Americans and significant support from white female Americans has now tipped the scale of the American electorate to the point where more people can vote for elected officials who will pass legislation requiring the government to provide them with either direct employment or substitute (unemployment) wages, retirement and health care benefits, food and housing allowances and subsidies, automobile trade-in credits, education vouchers and other forms of payments, subsidies and grants that are funded by the tax payments of a small minority of the electorate.

A fundamental is that any minority, regardless of its determination – racial, ethnic, economic, cultural, societal or whatever is deemed to nevertheless have certain protections, even if their numbers are de minimis. This is fundamental. No one has the right to tax a person into subjugation. No low income group has the right to vote themselves excessive payments that are funded by a higher income group. That is nothing short of theft authorized by the law. What is the difference between the armed king’s (the current guys ain’t no Robin Hood) men showing up at the village and stealing the harvested crops and livestock and using it for their own purposes and the IRS and state and local taxing bodies taking 50%, 60% or more of citizen’s income and giving it to their bureaucratic employees and voters who support such programs, subsidies and wealth redistributions?

Democracy is more than one man – one vote. It requires a working, taxpaying electorate, common sense traditions and limits on government activities and it requires strong protections for all minorities to keep their wages from confiscation by arbitrary redistribution techniques. This fundamental was always unwritten. Now, it needs to be written. In the form of an amendment(s) to the USConstitution. What is the alternative? France? Sweden?

There is a strong seductive appeal to taxing the bejesus out of the better-to-do, particularly after the excesses and consequences of the last several decades. TheFundamentals believes that the US has been on a self destructive past for over 40 years (we were there in Ann Arbor, MI in May 1964 when LBJ announced the great society.) To follow up the eight destructive years of GWBush and his mostly supportive congress with four (and possibly eight) years of the current occupant and a phenomenally exaggerated group of liberal democrats is a certain path to middle class suicide.

There is no leader or group of leaders in the US at present who understand or adhere to the simple fundamental of setting and keeping limits. Setting and maintaining limits is a fundamental of life. Greed, gluttony and the arrogance of US political leaders has placed the republic at the precipice, if not in the throes, of destruction.