December 20, 2007
by Clay Barham
Look at all the energy we use to find new ways to tax people. It is flat, round, square and sales, or some other method. We have lost sight of the reason for taxes in the quest to improve the means. A tax was once a tithe for the church. To operate the church, the church asked, I said, asked their people to give ten percent of their income to it. A tax has mostly been a bill presented to a citizen to pay for the support of government services they used. They were most often use-taxes. When we buy gasoline, the taxes applied to gasoline are supposed to pay for roads and road maintenance.
The taxes charged and collected usually related to what people considered necessary services provided by government. The majority of those services were close to the people, from cities and counties. It was no different than paying the doctor for his service or the power and telephone companies for their services. It was, basically, tit-for-tat taxing.
Taxes are payments to government to support the people and equipment needed for government to provide the service we asked for. A national military defense program to protect our Nation is a case in point. Soldiers, sailors and fliers need to be paid, and they need the best tools to do the best job. We all understand. Furthermore, we get what we pay for. If we get stingy with defense spending, we might lose a conflict with an aggressive nation that spends more.
The problem with taxes today is they are no longer just pay for what we need. Taxation in America today, at both the state and federal levels, are behavior modification taxes. The tax you pay is established to alter your, or someone's behavior. The primary manipulation by taxing is the redistribution of income. The purpose is to pick the pockets from those who have more, and give it to those who have little in their pockets. It is not important whether the spending of those collected taxes is proper and without fraud, because the money is spread around and reallocated in the final analysis.
No one believes it is bad, then, for a congressional representative to add costly, non-essential earmarks to legislation if it puts money into the pockets of those who bring him votes in his district. That is a customary benefit of the position. No one feels bad if checks go to dead people or departments to waste money on foolish projects. It is all in the game for tit-for-tat taxation policies. No one gets excited when taxes go up every year or the government spends more than it takes in. No one cares because taxes are manipulative and not related to real spending needs.
What should be the purpose of taxing and how should we spend the money? If these questions were put before the voters, would they come back and support the way it is being done today, or would they go back to the way it was first done in America?
First, we form governments at three levels. The City and County level is the primary level for government services. Few people in the private sector would perform them. Law enforcement, courts and jails are examples, and fire fighting is another. Legislating laws and ordinances, such as no spitting on the sidewalk, drive on the right side, pick up after your animals and do not walk on the grass is another.
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As the legal system moves up to the next level, the state, we have laws on property, murder, contracts, road rules and the like. We have superior courts and prisons. These services are paid from taxes collected from those who use them, the citizens of the cities, counties and states. The tit-for-tat tax crowd cannot easily plunder governments that are close to citizens. Things are easier to see, at these two levels.
We move to the third and most distant level, the Federal Government. The functions given this level of government, by the people, are few and enumerated. Funding them should not be difficult. Our congressional representatives should keep a close eye on the use of the taxpayer's money.
Instead, the Federal Treasury has become the trough around which pigs feast. Initially, there were four cabinet-level department heads, now there are fifteen, many of which duplicate state and local functions and are conduits for taxpayer's money to special interests. If we were to eliminate ten or eleven of those money-sucking bureaucracies, we would probably save the taxpayers thirty to forty percent on just expenditures while returning their functions back to the states and the people as the 10th Amendment says.
It really does not mean much to the American Taxpayer to squabble over how the taxes are collected as much as it does why they are collected and how to cut them back. Once a demand for taxpayer money gets into the outgoing pipeline, it never stops, even if the end users are no longer there. Money to bureaucrats means nothing. Wasting collected taxes, to the socialists and behavior modifiers among us, mean little, as long as they are taken away from the ones who earn it and reinvest it into new enterprises hiring more people..
If you want to see how far America has come from its roots and its best performance, just follow the money from the time taxes were very low to the present, where they are very high and confiscatory, getting even more of a burden with each Democrat elected.
As taxes rise, freedom retreats.
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Clay Barham [send him email] has been a candidate for the California legislature and a stand-in talk show host for ABC. He was educated in physical and behavioral sciences, with a Ph.D. in sociology. He is the author of five books, with his latest being Foundations of Modern American Conservatism and Liberalism: The Roots of Freedom and Tyranny. Visit his website at http://www.claysamerica.com.
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