Mark Steyn’s NRO post today, Tax Season, analogizes tax season to baseball season which, for most of us, is a spectator sport. Yeah, that’s right, we pay at the gate and again for the peanuts and crackerjacks while the guys on the field play and get paid. That’s the opposite of Mark’s analogy. During tax season, the taxpaying-players pay, and the spectators in the stands get in free and enjoy free peanuts and crackerjacks. No wonder they don’t care if they “never get back. Cause it’s root, root for the” Obama team. “If they don’t win, it’s a shame.” Here my choice of Jack Norworth’s 1908 baseball standard as an analogy breaks down. It’s highly improbable, almost impossible that “they” won’t win. Why? Cause like baseball now, the spectators will shortly outnumber the taxpaying players. Thus, the point of Mark’s article.
“And yet for an increasing number of Americans, tax season is like baseball season: It’s a spectator sport. According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009, 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax. Obviously, many of them pay other kinds of taxes — state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why). Half a decade back, it was just under 40 percent who paid no federal income tax; now it’s just under 50 percent. By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury. In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from “No taxation without representation” to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, and bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it.”
“The top 5 percent of taxpayers contribute 60 percent of revenue. The top 10 percent provide 75 percent. Another 40-odd percent make up the rest. And half are exempt. This isn’t redistribution — a “leveling” to address the “maldistribution” of income, as Sen. Max Baucus (D., Kleptocristan) put it the other day. It isn’t even “spreading the wealth around,” as then-senator Obama put it in an unfortunate off-the-prompter moment during the 2008 campaign. Rather, it’s an assault on the moral legitimacy of the system. If you accept the principle of a tax on income, it might seem reasonable to exclude the very poor from having to contribute to it. But in no meaningful sense of the term can half the country be considered “poor.”
Two Points: One, if you don’t pay for it, you don’t appreciate it. The dole, the negative tax, the entitlements exacerbate an entitlement/dependency mentality that only wants and demands more and really doesn’t appreciate what is given with any contribution!
Two: The percentage of taxpayers supporting the system will decline and decline more, until it wakes up and leaves. We have reached the “tipping point” in social security with more going out than coming in. Medicare is worse, as is Medicaid, the states unfunded liabilities and government debt, deficits and unfunded liabilities follow in order.
That the idiot we have as president, Obama, with his leftist minions, Pelosi and Reid, and the Democratic congress have added Obamacare as another gigantic entitlement to this unsustainable pyramid is immoral now and all the more so later. Obama has proven himself anti-life as that term applies to live birth abortions; he has now done so as to our precious grandchildren now living.
The sad truth that Mark Steyn makes is that there are going to be more voters voting themselves free “peanuts and crackerjacks” than taxpayers paying for everything!