StackerKen
15th April 2010, 04:51 PM
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/15/politics/otherpeoplesmoney/main4945874.shtml
(CBS) On April 15, don't be surprised if the line at your local post office is a bit shorter than usual. That's because your neighbors may not be paying any income taxes this year.
An astonishing 43.4 percent of Americans now pay zero or negative federal income taxes. The number of single or jointly-filing "taxpayers" - the word must be applied sparingly - who pay no taxes or receive government handouts has reached 65.6 million, out of a total of 151 million.
Those numbers come from an analysis published yesterday by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. Neither is a low-tax or conservative advocacy group; the Urban Institute was created under the Johnson administration during the Great Society era, and it receives most of its funding from the federal government.
"You've got a larger and larger share of people paying less and less for the services provided by the federal government," says Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. "The concern is that the majority can say, 'Let's have more benefits, spend more,' if they're not paying for it. It's 'free.' That's not a good thing to have."
By historic standards, today's situation is an aberration. Between 1950 and 1990, the number of owe-no-money federal tax returns averaged 21 percent, dipping to 18 percent in 1986, according to Tax Foundation data. In the 1990s, the owe-no-money percentage hovered around 25 percent of taxpayers.
But then politicians began another round of tinkering with the tax code, adding reams of new pages to an already incomprehensible set of rules that even the guy overseeing the IRS can't seem to figure out.
Democrats wanted to lower taxes on the least affluent, while Republicans wanted to lower taxes on everyone. The result was bipartisan enthusiasm for tax credits aimed at everything from children (1997) and college students (1997) to hybrid cars (2005) and homebuyers (2009). Many of these credits dole out cash to people even if they report no income, making them mere government handouts.
"There's no difference at all in terms of the effects on the federal deficit," says Williams of the Tax Policy Center. "It's perfectly equivalent. It's just easier to say, 'I cut your taxes' as opposed to 'I created a new federal program to send money to people.'"
I'm talking here about federal income taxes, not other taxes like Social Security, Medicare, state income taxes, sales taxes, or car registration taxes, some of which are extracted through payroll deductions. The owe-no-money crowd tends to get hit by at least some of those.
The perils of today's situation should be obvious. The United States is close to a tipping point - where most people can skip the post office run on April 15 to mail a check because they're expecting one from the government instead.
"It is somewhat odd that you have a decreasing number of folks paying into the federal income tax system, a decreasing number of folks who have a stake in what the government pays for," says Matt Moon of the non-partisan Tax Foundation in Washington, D.C.
It then becomes tempting to vote for politicians promising more and more handouts, paid for by money forcibly extracted from an ever-shrinking number of their neighbors. In addition to being immoral, it's poor public policy: people who pay no taxes but nevertheless get benefits are less likely to be careful overseers of their elected representatives.
"At some point people become less and less invested in making sure their government is accountable and frugal," says Peter Sepp, vice president for policy and communications at the National Taxpayers Union, a lower-tax advocacy group. "If you pay very little for getting all kinds of government benefits, you might view those programs as a bargain, even though they may waste tens of billions of dollars a year."
As a candidate, President Obama promised still more tax credits, including ones aimed at child care, "clean cars," and savings accounts. As the Wall Street Journal explained at the time: "You can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer - a federal check - from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this 'welfare,' or in George McGovern's 1972 campaign a 'Demogrant.'"
A recession, the stimulus, and innumerable bailouts have placed Mr. Obama's plans on hold. But the expiration of the Bush tax cuts at midnight on December 31, 2010 will renew interest in a tax law rewrite.
That will be an opportunity to gut the current system and replace it with something simpler and fairer. After all, if government is important enough to force most of us to work until April 13 to pay its bills, why shouldn't everyone share the pain?
by Phyllis Schlafly April 16, 2010
http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2010/apr10/10-04-16.html
Income tax day, April 15, 2010, now divides Americans into two almost equal classes: those who pay for the services provided by government and the freeloaders. The percentage of Americans who will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009 has risen to 47 percent.
That isn't the worst of it. The bottom 40 percent not only pay no income tax, but the government sends them cash or benefits financed by the taxes dutifully paid by those who do pay income tax.
The outright cash handouts include the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which can amount to as much as $5,657 a year to low-income families. Other financial benefits can include child tax credits, welfare, food stamps, WIC (Women, Infants, Children), housing subsidies, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, S-CHIP, and other programs.
This is both a massive transfer of wealth and a soak-the-rich racket. The top 10 percent pay 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.
Rep Paul Ryan (R-WI) has become the congressional leader in explaining details of the recently passed Health Control Law. He says that, based on Congressional Budget Office figures, taxes to pay for Obamacare will have to skyrocket to an 88 percent income tax rate within 30 years.
Although all wage-earners help fund their own Social Security and Medicare benefits, only federal income taxpayers pay the costs of running the federal government, and are responsible for paying off our $12.8 trillion national debt and for bailing out Social Security, Medicare, and Fannie and Freddie when they collapse.
Even the recently passed Health Control Law contains financial subsidies to unmarried couples that are denied to married couples. This rewards the unmarried women who were the second largest demographic constituency that voted for Obama for President in 2008.
When Obama told Joe the Plumber he wanted to "spread the wealth around," Obama wasn't kidding. That's exactly what he is now doing: taking money from taxpayers and spreading it around to non-taxpayers.
Nor was Obama kidding when, on the eve of his election, he threatened, "We are going to fundamentally transform the United States of America." Converting the earnings of American workers into handouts for those who voted for Obama in 2008 is certainly a fundamental transformation.
Obama's promise not to raise taxes on Middle Americans is already down the drain. Obama brought former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker out of obscurity to serve as chairman of an Economic Recovery Advisory Board and announce that we need to raise taxes.
Volcker was blunt in predicting that the new tax increase will be a Value Added Tax (VAT). That's the tax European Socialists love because its rates can be hidden and frequently raised, while producing rivers of revenue for the bureaucrats.
Volcker claimed that a VAT is "not a toxic idea." It really is; Charles Krauthammer called it "the ultimate cash cow" because it transfers so much money from individuals to the government.
Having already co-opted the executive and legislative branches of government for his fundamental transformation, Obama now wants to use the judiciary, too. The retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens gives him this opportunity.
On January 18, 2001 on Public Radio WBEZ-FM, Chicago, Obama complained that the Earl Warren Court "wasn't that radical" because "It didn't break free from the essential constraints placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. . . . The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and serve more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society."
Calling for the Supreme Court to participate in the "redistribution of wealth" is shockingly revolutionary. Any judicial nominee who agrees with Obama's theory should be rejected.
Obama's game plan to "fundamentally transform" America is based on both Saul Alinsky's modus operandi for community organizing and on the Cloward-Piven spending strategy. Saul Alinsky was a famous Chicago radical, and Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were less-well-known Columbia University sociologists.
The goal of all three of these agitators was the overthrow of the private enterprise system. The Alinsky strategy is to use community organizing and mass demonstrations by those he labeled the "Have Nots," and the Cloward-Piven strategy is to overload the bureaucracy with enormous demands for entitlements, thereby causing a financial crisis.
Obama used Alinsky methods by taxpayer financing of ACORN and sub-prime mortgages. Obama used Cloward-Piven methods by massive deficit spending for entitlements for more and more millions of people.
Fortunately, hard-working, taxpaying Americans are beginning to understand how they are being ripped off and rushed into bankruptcy. The one way to save ourselves and our country is to elect a Congress in November pledged to stop the spending
(CBS) On April 15, don't be surprised if the line at your local post office is a bit shorter than usual. That's because your neighbors may not be paying any income taxes this year.
An astonishing 43.4 percent of Americans now pay zero or negative federal income taxes. The number of single or jointly-filing "taxpayers" - the word must be applied sparingly - who pay no taxes or receive government handouts has reached 65.6 million, out of a total of 151 million.
Those numbers come from an analysis published yesterday by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. Neither is a low-tax or conservative advocacy group; the Urban Institute was created under the Johnson administration during the Great Society era, and it receives most of its funding from the federal government.
"You've got a larger and larger share of people paying less and less for the services provided by the federal government," says Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. "The concern is that the majority can say, 'Let's have more benefits, spend more,' if they're not paying for it. It's 'free.' That's not a good thing to have."
By historic standards, today's situation is an aberration. Between 1950 and 1990, the number of owe-no-money federal tax returns averaged 21 percent, dipping to 18 percent in 1986, according to Tax Foundation data. In the 1990s, the owe-no-money percentage hovered around 25 percent of taxpayers.
But then politicians began another round of tinkering with the tax code, adding reams of new pages to an already incomprehensible set of rules that even the guy overseeing the IRS can't seem to figure out.
Democrats wanted to lower taxes on the least affluent, while Republicans wanted to lower taxes on everyone. The result was bipartisan enthusiasm for tax credits aimed at everything from children (1997) and college students (1997) to hybrid cars (2005) and homebuyers (2009). Many of these credits dole out cash to people even if they report no income, making them mere government handouts.
"There's no difference at all in terms of the effects on the federal deficit," says Williams of the Tax Policy Center. "It's perfectly equivalent. It's just easier to say, 'I cut your taxes' as opposed to 'I created a new federal program to send money to people.'"
I'm talking here about federal income taxes, not other taxes like Social Security, Medicare, state income taxes, sales taxes, or car registration taxes, some of which are extracted through payroll deductions. The owe-no-money crowd tends to get hit by at least some of those.
The perils of today's situation should be obvious. The United States is close to a tipping point - where most people can skip the post office run on April 15 to mail a check because they're expecting one from the government instead.
"It is somewhat odd that you have a decreasing number of folks paying into the federal income tax system, a decreasing number of folks who have a stake in what the government pays for," says Matt Moon of the non-partisan Tax Foundation in Washington, D.C.
It then becomes tempting to vote for politicians promising more and more handouts, paid for by money forcibly extracted from an ever-shrinking number of their neighbors. In addition to being immoral, it's poor public policy: people who pay no taxes but nevertheless get benefits are less likely to be careful overseers of their elected representatives.
"At some point people become less and less invested in making sure their government is accountable and frugal," says Peter Sepp, vice president for policy and communications at the National Taxpayers Union, a lower-tax advocacy group. "If you pay very little for getting all kinds of government benefits, you might view those programs as a bargain, even though they may waste tens of billions of dollars a year."
As a candidate, President Obama promised still more tax credits, including ones aimed at child care, "clean cars," and savings accounts. As the Wall Street Journal explained at the time: "You can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer - a federal check - from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this 'welfare,' or in George McGovern's 1972 campaign a 'Demogrant.'"
A recession, the stimulus, and innumerable bailouts have placed Mr. Obama's plans on hold. But the expiration of the Bush tax cuts at midnight on December 31, 2010 will renew interest in a tax law rewrite.
That will be an opportunity to gut the current system and replace it with something simpler and fairer. After all, if government is important enough to force most of us to work until April 13 to pay its bills, why shouldn't everyone share the pain?
by Phyllis Schlafly April 16, 2010
http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2010/apr10/10-04-16.html
Income tax day, April 15, 2010, now divides Americans into two almost equal classes: those who pay for the services provided by government and the freeloaders. The percentage of Americans who will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009 has risen to 47 percent.
That isn't the worst of it. The bottom 40 percent not only pay no income tax, but the government sends them cash or benefits financed by the taxes dutifully paid by those who do pay income tax.
The outright cash handouts include the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which can amount to as much as $5,657 a year to low-income families. Other financial benefits can include child tax credits, welfare, food stamps, WIC (Women, Infants, Children), housing subsidies, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, S-CHIP, and other programs.
This is both a massive transfer of wealth and a soak-the-rich racket. The top 10 percent pay 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.
Rep Paul Ryan (R-WI) has become the congressional leader in explaining details of the recently passed Health Control Law. He says that, based on Congressional Budget Office figures, taxes to pay for Obamacare will have to skyrocket to an 88 percent income tax rate within 30 years.
Although all wage-earners help fund their own Social Security and Medicare benefits, only federal income taxpayers pay the costs of running the federal government, and are responsible for paying off our $12.8 trillion national debt and for bailing out Social Security, Medicare, and Fannie and Freddie when they collapse.
Even the recently passed Health Control Law contains financial subsidies to unmarried couples that are denied to married couples. This rewards the unmarried women who were the second largest demographic constituency that voted for Obama for President in 2008.
When Obama told Joe the Plumber he wanted to "spread the wealth around," Obama wasn't kidding. That's exactly what he is now doing: taking money from taxpayers and spreading it around to non-taxpayers.
Nor was Obama kidding when, on the eve of his election, he threatened, "We are going to fundamentally transform the United States of America." Converting the earnings of American workers into handouts for those who voted for Obama in 2008 is certainly a fundamental transformation.
Obama's promise not to raise taxes on Middle Americans is already down the drain. Obama brought former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker out of obscurity to serve as chairman of an Economic Recovery Advisory Board and announce that we need to raise taxes.
Volcker was blunt in predicting that the new tax increase will be a Value Added Tax (VAT). That's the tax European Socialists love because its rates can be hidden and frequently raised, while producing rivers of revenue for the bureaucrats.
Volcker claimed that a VAT is "not a toxic idea." It really is; Charles Krauthammer called it "the ultimate cash cow" because it transfers so much money from individuals to the government.
Having already co-opted the executive and legislative branches of government for his fundamental transformation, Obama now wants to use the judiciary, too. The retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens gives him this opportunity.
On January 18, 2001 on Public Radio WBEZ-FM, Chicago, Obama complained that the Earl Warren Court "wasn't that radical" because "It didn't break free from the essential constraints placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. . . . The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and serve more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society."
Calling for the Supreme Court to participate in the "redistribution of wealth" is shockingly revolutionary. Any judicial nominee who agrees with Obama's theory should be rejected.
Obama's game plan to "fundamentally transform" America is based on both Saul Alinsky's modus operandi for community organizing and on the Cloward-Piven spending strategy. Saul Alinsky was a famous Chicago radical, and Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were less-well-known Columbia University sociologists.
The goal of all three of these agitators was the overthrow of the private enterprise system. The Alinsky strategy is to use community organizing and mass demonstrations by those he labeled the "Have Nots," and the Cloward-Piven strategy is to overload the bureaucracy with enormous demands for entitlements, thereby causing a financial crisis.
Obama used Alinsky methods by taxpayer financing of ACORN and sub-prime mortgages. Obama used Cloward-Piven methods by massive deficit spending for entitlements for more and more millions of people.
Fortunately, hard-working, taxpaying Americans are beginning to understand how they are being ripped off and rushed into bankruptcy. The one way to save ourselves and our country is to elect a Congress in November pledged to stop the spending