Taxes are like beauty – they’re all in the eye of the beholder. How you behold usually depends on how on how the taxman is treating you, personally. It’s always the same argument, although it will be more heated than usual this year; those opposed to the recent large tax increases will hold reenactments of the Boston Tea Party and those supporting the increases will sing their praises.
Before you put your personal political stamp on issue, you should have the facts. The best place to get those is the Tax Foundation (www.taxfoundation.org). The Tax Foundation is a nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington, D.C.
For the average American, Tax Freedom Day (a registered trademark of the Tax Foundation), will be April 13, 2009. The recession has actually moved it up 2 weeks earlier than it was last year, it’s the earliest it’s been since 1967, but if you think that’s good news read on. Americans will pay more in taxes in 2009 than they will spend on food, clothing and housing combined. To put it in historical perspective, in 1944 at the height of WWII, Tax Freedom Day was March 29 and all taxes equaled 24 percent of income. Today it is up to 28.2 percent.
Because we are a high tax state, Tax Freedom Day for Californians is not April 13 this year – it’s April 20 and the average Californians will spend 110 days working to pay their taxes in 2009. That’s the fourth longest period in the nation.
However, even that is misleading because it does not count your share of the ballooning federal deficit. When you add that in, Tax Freedom Day moves more than a month later to May 28 and you must work 148 days to pay the annual government debt.
The average doesn’t mean a thing if you’re not average and few taxpayers are. Some people pay a lot less, some will pay a lot more and everyone will tell you it’s not fair; just ask them. The word fair should never be used in the same sentence with the word taxes; when it comes to taxes there is no such thing as fair.
Reasonable people agree on two things; some taxes are necessary and the tax system is a total mess. If it’s not a total mess, how do you explain all the people in government and finance that have so-called “tax issues”? These are supposed to be the experts, but they have issues galore – when you and I have those same kinds of issues, they just call us tax cheats, but government royalty gets a pass. There is something wrong with that.
While we complain about taxes, we love to tax the hell out of strangers, so we sock it to the visitors with things like a hotel occupancy tax and they sock it right back to us with the same tax in their towns. Yeah, that works – the only folks smiling about it are the tax collectors.
I don’t understand why the tax code has to be so complicated; I do understand some things, however. The first is that the recession has everyone cutting back except the taxman. The government’s take as a percentage keeps going up, not down; they’ve just hide things like the deficit. The second issue is that we’re not getting our money’s worth and that the worse part by far. The untold billions that were wasted, stolen and abused have now become untold trillions.
Finally, there will be no real tax reform – ever. Sen. Russell B. Long summed it up best 30 years ago when he said that tax reform simply meant: “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree!”
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident. His column runs Tuesdays. Reach him at
cw*****@ya***.com
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