What Is A Right If You Have To Pay For It?

We who work for our living, who don’t have income apart from our daily jobs, we who are teachers and bus drivers and shop owners and engineers and CPAs and plumbers, artists, fast food workers, piano tuners, electricians – we who work for our living and have nothing else to fall back on: I have a question for us.  How did we allow the sweat of our brow to be hijacked by cushy politicians and the unbelievably wealthy investor class?  How did we allow them to craft legislation that burdens and belittles and humiliates the one thing we have that keeps us going from day to day, week to week, month to month?  How did we let them put our sweat in chains – our daily toil, our labor?

Why place a tax on the income from our labor when they can just as easily – no, far more easily – get it from us as we spend?  Two years ago the state of California was looking at bumping up their sales tax by one penny.  That little bump was expected to bring in an additional $4.5 billion in one year.  Not million – billion.  Seligman was absolutely right when he said that we don’t often think of the tremendous amount of revenue that can be raised from modest taxes on foreign goods and certain products made here.  And I think the government would prefer that we don’t think of such things, but instead keep believing in the “necessity of the income tax” myth.  Something else to think about: it’s estimated that if the income tax were to disappear overnight, the revenue levels of the federal government would fall back to what they were in the 1990’s.  I was there in the 1990’s, and it certainly didn’t feel anything like the nightmare of the 1930’s we’ve all heard about.

I’ve been living in the same 1-bedroom apartment since 2004.  I have two growing boys whom I spend time with almost every day.  I can’t afford a 2-bedroom, so we make do.  According to the federal government tables, my toil over the last six years has put me $45,000 in debt to Uncle Sam.  You see, I’ve been working to make ends meet every month and to get out of legitimate debt, but look what I get.  I get to erase an entire year’s worth of income from that six years and hand it over to the government.

I've never asked the government for handouts; I’ve never taken unemployment.  I’ve worked through some very dark financial times.  No one gives me anything to clothe, feed and house my children.  I make it happen from one month to the next by working.  That’s all I have.  And every penny I earn is a penny I spend.  I have no savings, no investments, nothing for the rainy days except the hope that my phone will ring again and someone will ask me to tune their piano.  And you know what?  For the last ten years, it’s worked.  I even stopped using credit as of about five years ago – I pay for everything as I go.  (Yet, still, I have tens of thousands of dollars in student loans and old medical bills hanging over my head.)

And the only thing I have to take care of it all is...my investment income?  Stock dividends?  Other forms of gambling?  No, just my hands, my tools, and that phone.  Take it as I’m spending, not as I sweat for it.

Chances are, you have just a little taken out of each paycheck, and it’s been that way since the first day you showed up for work.  You’re used to it.  You don’t feel it the way I do.  You don’t feel the degradation, the humiliation, the frustration.  But brother or sister, let me tell you, just because you’ve never felt the lash, the slap in the face or the heaviness of the chain you wear doesn’t make you any less of a slave than I am.  Wake up!

Taxes?  Sure, let there be taxes.  But for humanity’s sake, don’t lay the burden on our fundamental human right to earn our living.  It’s all we’ve got!