Taxation and Our Government

Every day you hear some Congressman talking about taxing the rich, and more welfare reform for the poor. If we go back in history to the times of Rome and Greece, every male owed one month of labor to the state. The state did not classify people as poor. You either came up with someone to work for you or you did the month of labor.

Now lets advance several thousand years. Today in the US, we have the rich, the middle class, and the poor. We know the poor don't pay much in taxes. The middle class is the real bread winner for the government. Then we have the rich. They don't really have to pay taxes either. Once you make the money, you can't be taxed on it a second time. We do have people that make over $100,000 a year working two and three jobs with the wife's wages added in, and these people are considered the rich that need to be taxed, neat huh?

Now here is where we get into the tax structure with an item called real estate taxes. Real Estate is visible wealth and is taxed as such. So if your house value triples in price, your house taxes also jump--California is an exception. Prop 13 limited the increase to a small yearly amount based on purchase price.Thats little consolation if you bought in the last two years. Notice that it is the Want-To-Be-Rich group of home owners that pay a disproportional part of their income in real estate taxes. And hey its all tax deductible. But loose your job and have no income, deduct it from what?

Now let the economic slowdown begin. Back in the 1920's local governments had been spending their new found wealth. Then in the 30's with the collapse of housing, the tax base for local communities collapsed. Schools closed because they couldn't meet the payroll. Here is a quote from The Great Depression pg. 93 by David Shannon

People never enjoy paying taxes. With the lower incomes of the depression came widespread demand for retrenchment and lower local taxes. Indeed, many citizens and property owners were quite unable to pay their taxes at all.
Since a large part of the revenues of local government is spent for public education, it was perhaps inevitable that the tax crisis should produce cutbacks in the schools. Many communities decreased their school spending severely. In effect, they passed the burden on to the teachers, the students, or both.

So we have the rich, the middle class, and the poor. The only ones that have lost their way, are the middle class. These are the people about to enter a new world, called bankruptcy.

Another compounding factor back in the 1930's was the legislative stupidity that figured "If you raise taxes and fees, it will bring in more income." Well, to their surprise it brought in less. I see examples of this same mentality in California today all around. Can you imagine a young driver running a photo street light having to pay $380 fine--Why not skip town and leave the State? My wife got caught, and she paid the fine, but there are a lot of people out there that this could result in a major change in their way of life.

Remember Economics 101. If you double the tax rate, you don't double the amount of taxes collected. The amount collected will be considerably less than what you previously collected before you doubled them. Unfortunately, intelligence is not a prerequisite when running for public office.