enthalpy

Thursday, April 08, 2010


What if after your week long Caribbean cruise you found out the company jacked up your price so they could give a free ride to nearly half of the other cruisers on board? Would you pay for the same trip next year? Probably not, yet chances are, that's what you do, every single year, when you pay your taxes.
Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions, but for nearly half of U.S. households it's simply somebody else's problem.

About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.

The result is a tax system that exempts almost half the country from paying for programs that benefit everyone, including national defense, public safety, infrastructure and education. It is a system in which the top 10 percent of earners -- households making an average of $366,400 in 2006 -- paid about 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.
I'm not advocating the privilege of paying taxes as being more American, but paying NO taxes, when other people are paying for services and privledges you enjoy every day, is definitely UN-American.

Being American ain't free, and I don't care if you are totally subsisting on government programs, you should have to kick back a portion of that to the IRS, just like everyone else. Hell, I don't even care if we have to give them more in handouts to get them to the same level. Everyone should know that all this freedom ain't free, and everyone should have to feel a little heat on April 15th.



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