25% of all personal income in the United States comes from government payrolls. That means a full quarter of Americans are living off of the earnings of other Americans. Even in the most productive nation on Earth, which we are, or the most robust economy on Earth, which we have — this is not sustainable.
Suppose you were interested in buying the same services on the open market that the government currently takes 25% of your income to pay for. If that were the case, you would expect to have some say in how those services were rendered. But in the current reality, you have no control over how your tax money is spent. Even worse, the people whose paychecks you are contributing to can be told to do their jobs differently at any time by people you do not vote for and you probably aren’t aware are also drinking your milkshake, to quote “There Will Be Blood.”
According to ZeroHedge, “[…] in the 1950s and 1960s, transfer payment was around 7%. This number rose into the low teens in the mid-1970s (after the Nixon Shock ended Bretton-Woods and closed the gold window). The number then jumped again after the financial crisis, spiking to the high teens. And now, the coronavirus panic has sent this number into the mid-20% range, after hitting a record high 31% in April.”
ZH asks important questions like, “Who is going to pay for all of this waste and abuse?” The answer is that we all will, until at least 3% of Americans stand up and say “enough is enough,” as the Founders would have expected us to do decades ago.
It’s a sad commentary on the Constitutional and historical awareness of the average American, but before 1913 there was no income tax in this country. Before then, income tax had long been considered a marker of clear and open tyranny. So, how did we grow to be so accepting of being taxed just for earning a living?
The reason for the 1913 Income Tax Act was to pay for our country’s role in World War I. We were told that the consequences of not fighting would be disastrous, that the innocent would die, that evil-doers would prevail… Does this sound familiar? Of course, it does. The fact is, people who seek power are not to be trusted, and money is power. Therefore, it stands to reason that the government will always push for more taxation.
We must always remember that the government cannot ever have its own money. The government produces no salable product, it creates no value that we cannot voluntarily create for ourselves. In fact, when enacted properly government is the people providing for itself.
