CapitalistMarks

End of tax season? Heck no!

Posted on 17. Apr, 2010 by scott in economic daydreaming

Papers, TV stations, radio stations and various town cryers have lauded the end of tax season this week.

We can’t believe them though.

Taxes are everywhere at all times.

Buy a car?  Check the sales form for everything from sales tax to tire taxes.

Buying a house?  Check the closing statement for everything from property tax to energy taxes.

Shopping for groceries or clothes?  Sales tax.

Buying gas for the weekend drive into the mountains?  Well, there is the $0.75 federal tax and sundry state and local taxes — all per gallon.

Wanna tan before the spring break beach party?  Uhhuh, thanks to the dems (remember not a single Repub voted for the health care bill) you now pay a tax on your quick-tan.  I could go on but I am too dang depressed because taxes will keep haunting me right through the end of next tax season — when nearly all our taxes will have to go up due to the huge city, county, state and federal deficits.

I guess I wouldn’t mind, since this really is a great country and we should all pay our part, but I read an article recently that confirmed what most of us income-tax paying types have believed for a long while.  About half of our entire tax-age population paid no taxes at all this year.  Shoot, what is fair or right about that?

And there are so many taxes that are hidden and add to costs of just about everything.  Take sugar.  We could get imported sugar a lot cheaper than the domestic stuff (and this isn’t like wine– it all tastes the same) and the reason is that our government puts tariffs (import taxes) on the dang stuff.  So, now my Dr. Pepper (I would like to start a Dr. Pepper party instead of a tea party) costs a whole lot more.  About 30% according to my reckoning.  Now, a nice big bottle of the Dr. costs about the same as a bottle of domestic wine did just  a few years ago.  (note:  few may be an exaggeration and I don’t drink wine so what do I know?)

The whole tax thing gets worse though.

Most Americans (the 50% of us that pay income taxes to support the others, anyway) can’t do our own taxes.   Too complicated.  We pay out of the ying-yang to get it done for us.  The tax code was 400 pages long in 1913 and is 70,000 pages today, or about 35 times as long as the new health care reform bill.  Who can read 70,000 pages let alone understand it when it is written not in English but in Governmentish (more complicated than Hieroglyphics.

Entire industries are built around the fact that the tax code is incomprehensible to the average American.  It takes the equivalent of about 4 million skilled professionals working full time to handle the paper work (thanks to The Economist for the arcane facts).

Does it make you wonder how all this got screwed up so much?  Just think of Congressmen (hundreds of them for over a hundred years) adding bits and pieces of tax code just to protect their own little constituency —  think of the credits you get for ‘bee-keeping’ or ‘hand-stitching’ footballs, or ‘bridges to nowhere’ and you will quickly get the answer.

I have said this before in this very forum and quite a few others.  Our tax system sucks!

Half the people supporting the other half?  Boy would Karl Marx ever smile at this system and we can’t let that dude win.

We need a national sales tax system (or Value Added Tax –VAT) to simplify and speed up the federal part of it all.  And contrary to what many complain, it can be done fairly and with a great more equity than the present system.  It won’t take an Army of congressmen to do it either.  Start with no taxes on any food or medical items to protect the poor, and then tax everything else at increasing rates based on basic utility.  In other words average priced cars (everyone needs them) are taxed low–say 10% and fancy-shmantzy cars (no one needs them) are taxed at 20%.  Funeral costs: 10%.  Wedding costs: 40%.  Golf: 10%.  Soccer: 70%.

You get the idea.

Put me in a room with 9 other average type Americans (tax payers) and give us a month — we will come up with a tax system and tax code that makes sense, works, is easy and fair in less than one month!

As for now, well I guess I won’t have to write about this particular travesty until next April 15 or so.

thanks to flickr’s josh thompson for the photo

Tags: income taxes, national sales tax, tax code, tax equity, tax season, unfair tax, value added tax, vat