‘Taxing’ Situation

Tom McLaughlin

My wife is ticked off. She finished preparing her taxes and I haven’t. Our dining room table has been covered with my papers for weeks. The printing calculator sits in the midst of slips and invoices for deductible things I paid for in 2009 and I’ve been working on it all when I can find a few hours between jobs. I’ve always hated paperwork, but it’s particularly hard to motivate myself with government paperwork She did all that for her private counseling practice weeks ago, but I’m still at it for my writing and property-management business and she can’t file until I’m ready.

“Make sure you tell the accountant it’s your fault and not mine,” she said. I filed for an extension and wrote checks for the amount we paid last year – about $11,000 for state and federal taxes. That’s in addition to what is taken out of my teacher’s salary for which I claim zero deductions – and I have them take out an additional $150 per pay period. The tax code is much too complicated to figure out, so we pay $300-$400 each year to have a CPA do help us with it. Sometime over the next six months, we’ll sit down with her and hope she can show us ways to avoid paying so much.

Half of all Americans, however, do not go through this because they pay no federal income tax. And, according to Derek Thompson at The Atlantic, because of college tuition credits, child credits, and something called the “Earned Income Tax Credit,” rather than write a check to the government, government writes them a check! These are not refunds I’m talking about here. They get more back from the government than was ever deducted from their paychecks – assuming they actually work. They don’t dread April 15th like I do. They look forward to it because it’s a payday. This time every year, money goes out of my account and into theirs.

During the first few years of my 35-year teaching career, government had me under the poverty line because I made less than $10,000 per year with a wife and four children. I cut firewood. We grew a garden, raised animals, drove clunkers, shopped at Goodwill, and ate a lot of soup. We got by and we even look back on those times as among our happiest. The kids are grown now and my wife works. I’m still a teacher but with a little business on the side, so now we’re “rich.” The left moans that “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Maybe it’s time to coin another phrase, such as “the ‘poor’ are getting richer while the ‘rich’ are getting poorer” because of the confiscatory power of government.

The Earned Income Tax Credit alone costs $50 billion a year. For months, I’ve been hearing radio ads in which a Spanish-accented woman tells us how fulfilling it is to work for the United Way telling more and more people about the EITC so they can get money from government too. In his latest column, Mark Steyn cited Congressman Paul Ryan’s claim that 20 percent of U.S. households get about 75 percent of their income from the federal government. Another 20 percent get 40 percent of their income from federal programs. That’s four out of 10 households. Throw in another 11 percent who are guilt-ridden, trust-funded, limousine liberals and you have a solid voting majority in any national election.

To keep this gravy train on the tracks, government goes further into debt by $1.5 trillion each year. We’re $12 trillion in the hole now, but with Obamacare, we’re frantically digging deeper. The McClatchy Newspapers write that since it passed, “Questions . . . have flooded insurance companies, doctors' offices, human resources departments and business groups. ‘They're saying, “Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?” ’ said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com.”

The top 25 percent of earners pay 85 percent of federal income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent pay only 3 percent – and that’s after those tax cuts for the “rich” they whine about so much.

Next on the liberal agenda is amnesty for about 20 million illegal aliens. That will make voters who don’t pay income tax an even more solid majority. Mark Steyn asks: “If 51 percent can vote themselves government lollipops from the other 49 percent, soon 60 percent will be shaking down the remaining 40 percent, and then 70 percent will be sticking it to the remaining 30 percent. How low can it go?”

Good question.

FamilySecurityMatters.orgContributing Editor Tom McLaughlin. Tom is a history teacher and a regular weekly columnist for newspapers in Maine and New Hampshire. He writes about political and social issues, history, family, education and Radical Islam. E-mail him at tommclaughlin@fairpoint.net.