A taxing dilemma

Yeah, it's getting to be that time of year.

Photo by Leon Dewiwje on Unsplash

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I haven’t started doing our taxes yet. TurboTax is ready for me to go, but I have an issue with my W-2 that needs to be corrected first. And, quite frankly, I’m in no hurry to get my annual governmental raping as a person who has 1099 employers who let me keep all the money I make until Uncle Sam comes calling.

So it’s time for me to do my regular caterwauling about the tax system that:

• is the first to get my money when I work my W-2 job (backup withholding)

• rewards people for certain actions while penalizing other behaviors

• still, even after all that, doesn’t come close to paying for all our federal spending (the real problem)

Has it ever occurred to you that those who set up their withholding to get a big refund in the spring that you’re simply giving the government an interest-free loan? Yet if you come up a little short (as I have in the past) and can’t pay right away, they sock you with late fees and interest?

For many years, I have been an advocate of the FairTax, which is in essence a national sales tax. It’s a strange position to advocate considering I live in a state which doesn’t currently have a sales tax, but I like it for two prime reasons: one, I can control my spending on new items in order to reduce my tax rate (or go hog wild if I don’t mind paying the tax) and two, the government has a much smaller impact on behavior through taxation. And if there’s the lack of revenue that opponents of the FairTax complain about, well, starving the beast isn’t a bad thing, either. Just pay for what the Constitution says we should.

However, in order to achieve the FairTax, we have to perform one key action: repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. The reason: if we retain the Sixteenth with the FairTax, it wouldn’t be long before a federal government that’s always complaining that there’s not enough revenue to begin double taxation, retaining both the FairTax and a resurrected income tax. (While we’re at it, we can get rid of the Seventeenth Amendment, too.)

Now you know as well as I do that the opponents of the FairTax (which include the government itself, those who grift off of it, and every tax return company out there - which includes Intuit, the folks who make TurboTax) will continue to oppose changes to a system they have taken advantage of for decades. It’s a little bit like Convention of States, which makes glacially incremental progress despite all the headwinds being placed against it by liberal groups who like the status quo.

But it seems like we’ve gone from being at least somewhat happy to pay a little bit to help our fellow man and have someone do the things that government does to a situation where the money just seems to go into a bottomless pit and not much gets done. It feels like we’re getting nothing for what we are paying in yet our nation is rapidly gaining on $35 trillion in debt. April 15 is just another sad reminder that Fedzilla is an enormous and hungry mouth to feed.

And now a little programming note: since I’ve gotten extremely busy at my other side hustles and actual paying jobs, I’m going to take a bit of a hiatus where I might only post once a week. Hopefully I’ll be back to normal in a few weeks, but I practically had this post done when everything came down. That’s why you didn’t get a post from The Knothole this week and may not next week, either.

In the meantime, though, you can Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now.