Fast Approaching the Tax Tipping Point
The public was recently inundated with the news that 47 percent of American households would pay no federal income taxes for 2009 whatsoever. Yes, they still enjoy the benefits that taxpayers enjoy, like “national defense, public safety, infrastructure and education,” but they do so free of charge.
In other words, the 53% of people who pay federal income taxes not only pay their own share but the share of those who live on the government’s dole as well. And while this may come as a shock to everyday citizens who work hard, pay their bills, and treasure their independence too much to be financially beholden to anyone or anything, including the government, there is nothing about it that shocks the minds of those who planned it.
Therefore, taking up where Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson left off, President Obama and his cohorts continue to push polices and legislation guaranteed to bring us to a point of no return: a point where the majority of American households pay no federal income taxes while a minority pay the taxes for everyone.
Such a point will be reached when non-taxpayers constitute 51% of our population. This is both the tipping point, beyond which substantive tax reform will become impossible, and the goal of a Democrat Party that knows dependents will always vote for those who promise the most freebies to their constituents.
It doesn’t matter that those constituents will be permanently impoverished. All that matters is that the Democrats will be in power. No wonder Rush Limbaugh has been warning his listeners that Obama is “in the process of creating and building a permanent underclass.”
This was obvious on February 17, 2009, when Obama extended unemployment benefits so as to guarantee that people who lost their jobs could look to the government for a taxpayer-funded paycheck for ten months. And to make the deal more enticing, although “unemployment benefits are normally taxed as regular income, [the bill Obama signed] … exempted the first $2,400 of unemployment from 2009 income taxes.”
In other words, not only does the great and powerful Obama provide willing citizens with an allowance on which they can live, but he also does his best to make sure that the allowance is tax free.
We’re phukt.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.” Alexander Tytler
Many of the nine-million unemployed will never go back to work and will thus become the necessary additional numbers of those on the government dole to put us over the 51% point. The Cloward-Piven strategy will have worked by next year. Between single-payer health care, cap&tax, illegal immigrants, unionization of the private industry and more government jobs, we are in for a terrible next few years.
It is impossible for the Cloward-Piven strategy to achieve its intended goal. The plan makes no sense. When they succeed at overloading the system, the system will collapse, but it will be a socialist system that they have just collapsed! What follows is violent revolution, and what comes out of it is unknowable.
The problem is the top 1% have not paid a dime in taxes since the disastrous Reagan tax cuts in the 1980′s. This is what all of today’s economic problems can be traced. If we seized the assets of this top 1%, we could guarantee health care, education, housing, and jobs for all as well as pay down the national debt.
We could take care of all the problems tomorrow if the goverment was not held hostage by the greedy rich for their own benefit!
First, what are you talking about? The top 1% pay over 40% of the taxes. Second, money is worthless if you can’t buy anything with it. If business owners can’t make a profit worth their while, they’ll shut down the business, meaning not only will their employees be laid off, but their customers will no longer have a merchant.
How do you know this? Do you get this information from the corporate media? Is that what they want you to believe? Do they think the truth would motivate the workers to rise up against the oppression of the fat cats who dine in country clubs and play golf all day while living off their trust funds? Would the truth convince American workers not to chase distractions like Sadaam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden and instead focus on what really matters?
What do you know of, “what really matters?” Money is everything to you. That’s not what really matters; that’s a chase after the wind. What do you know of Truth, son of Satan? You are like your father, the devil: a liar, a thief and a murderer.
You’re the one making the outrageous claim that rich people don’t pay taxes, contrary to what the Congressional Budget Office and the US Treasury say. I don’t see any oppression in America, except an oppressive government that refuses to leave people alone! I have news for you: you are greedy. You don’t have to be rich to be greedy. Greed is the worship of money, and you worship money. You see everything in terms of money, because money is your god.
How do you know any of those organizations is telling the truth. Government agencies exist to serve the corporate plutocrats. They will make up any numbers that serve their class interests and the mainstream media never question them,just like they never question the official stories behind 9-11 or the Kennedy assasination.
the figures are straight from the IRS itself
Apostle of Love, your handle should be Apostle of I’ve Been Reading Too Much Huffington Post. eventually you will come to place blame on the politicians rather than falling for their misdirection and blaming supposed fat-cats.
No way. Even the Huffington Post doesn’t advocate his insane positions. Apostle of Love’s handle should be Apostle of Communism, for he is a communist and links to a communist blog.
PC: Corporations do pay taxes-35% on their bottom line. And then the owner pays his/her taxes as well. We have the highest corporate taxation in the world.
Many states and their legislatures have unloaded taxes for a few years to entice companies to build there in order to get their citizens a job. The American taxpayer does not ante up for companies. Geez, quit with the cliches already. If you have to parrot the Dem talking points, don’t come here.
For the semi-illiterate here, why do you think so many companies have moved off shore? Because they were getting taxed, litigated and unionized out of business.
Apostle: Dude, either you are sooo deluded from drinking from the fountain of Demogogery, or you have no clue as to what you are talking about. Either way, you sound totally &%$$#@&()
technically, any taxes paid by a corporation are just passed on to the customers, shareholders or employees.
Apostle do you know any history? Any facts? Look at the Carter years with the highest peacetime taxes in history – result horrible economy vs. the Reagan years with the sensible and stimulating tax cuts – result booming economy. That was no accident. The so called “disastrous” Reagan tax cuts pulled us out of the Carter recession. I lived through it and I remember. I have news for you, government doesn’t create anything except bloated self-sustaining bureaucracies, and is good for not much of anything except national defense. The best thing the government can do is get out of the way of that top 1% of taxpayers, decrease their tax burden, and let them do what entrepreneurial Americans have always done – create. If they do, that expansion is what will create a vibrant, booming economy, and the jobs you try to blame them for having lost. Our top tax burden is approaching 70%. The rich are thinking – I have enough money. If the government is going to take 3/4 of what I earn if I’m successful, why bother, why risk it? 100% of my investment is at risk in order to return a reward of maybe 25-30? High taxes discourage the risk taking inherent in new business ventures. This has been proven over and over again in history, and not just in America. How much innovation do you see coming out of France? Russia? China? That is why these countries have chronically high unemployment. Your suggestion will result in job losses, not gains. Hello?
Have you ever attempted to actually think through what you are saying here? Parroting mindless talking points does not result in intelligent discussion. Progressivism and political correctness are what is ruining this country, along with the MSM that gave up serious journalism long ago, and now simply soaks up progressive propaganda and spits it out to anyone who will listen. Phony environmentalism also is tremendously costly. Major projects are prevented from going forward or a third of California is cut off from its water supply due to the supposed need to protect a 1/2 inch long fish that nobody ever heard of. And what amount of worldwide assets have been spent on supposed global warming, now exposed to be the largest and phoniest fraud perpetrated in world history? Do yourself a favor and abandon Huffington Post and Daily Kos, and spend a little time reading history in the library – any history, it doesn’t matter. The absurdity of your solution to our economic woes is simple economic truth in any society. Try a little reading about George Washington or John Adams or Alexander Hamilton. Our founding fathers had a healthy and profound fear of big government, and designed our Constitution accordingly. That fear has somehow been lost in history, and we now ignore many of the Constitution’s mandates, or it is treated as a “living document” that can mean what any activist judge wants it to mean.
Free health care, education, housing, and jobs for all sounds great. Who wouldn’t want that? But it doesn’t exist and never will. Life isn’t fair. There is no utopia. But the noble American experiment has proven that given the freedom to do so, our people will get off their butts and get after it, and everyone will be better off. Government handouts didn’t build America. It’s like the difference in giving the people fish and teaching them how to fish. The first is much easier, but must be sustained for life. The second is much harder, but its teaching lasts a lifetime. Your solution is to give them fish, not teach them how, or allow them to learn for themselves, but this creates an unsustainable lifetime dependency – the nanny state. Bloated governments like that situation. Then you must come to them and be dependent upon them for everything. After all, they know better than the little people. Why are you buying this nonsense. Apostle of Love needs to learn how to fish.
Before you say, “A Smith&Weston beats five aces,” consider that the pot consists of chips, not money. If you’re going to play like that, the cashier won’t be good for the money. To spell it out for you, if you try to seize and liquidate all the assets of the rich, you’ll find that no one is willing and able to buy them from you. You’ll be as stuck with those illiquid assets as the banks are stuck with thousands upon thousands of foreclosed homes that won’t sell.
if we seized every penny of the assets of the top 1%, it would be enough to run the govt for less than 6 months.
And that’s IF we could get fair market value for it, which as I noted above, we wouldn’t.
Who will be John Galt? How many will be able to take their productivity and fall off the grid, and how many more will be trapped into the “production class”? Or, since we’re Americans, will those of us who work and produce enough to have the fruits of our labors taxed really put up with it? After all, why did the founding fathers put the second amendment in there? So that we could protect ourselves from the single criminal, or to protect ourselves from a criminal government? It is truly scary to think what “progressivism” could push Americans to do. God help us all.
AWR Hawkins,
Fascinating read. Jon Stossel touched on this frighteningly inevitable encounter recently.
blotto, I begrudgingly agree with your surmising of the 9 million ‘perma-unemployed’.
I have more than a handful of friends who have been playing Mr. Mom for 6, 8 and 12 + months.
These very same colleege educated people are applying to customer service, food industry-type positions, albeit turned away for a myriad of nonsensical reasons.
Like these friends I’ve the ‘Man provides’ bred in me since having a paper route when 10 years old. My heart aches for these guys. Women as well in the same situation. Frustrating as hell considering it can be remedied if so inclined..
This has to be a campaign issue on November. Obama is quickly creating what Rush Lmbaugh describes as a “permanent underclass.” Once he does, we will hit the point Hawkins describes.
Mr. Hawkins:
“President Obama and his cohorts continue to push polices and legislation guaranteed to bring us to a point of no return: a point where the majority of American households pay no federal income taxes while a minority pay the taxes for everyone.”
Y’know, for some odd reason, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the life and career of Salvador Allende of Chile.
Don’t know if that MEANS anything…maybe I’ve heard one too many Lady Ga-Ga songs?
Salvador Allende tried to create a compassionate, democratic society in Chile that truly provided justice to workers and the poor. Since this would provide a good example for American workers, the CIA set up the stooge Pinochet to engage in genocidal slaughter of the defenders of peace and justice rivaled only by Hitler and Bush, and to set up the most iron-fisted dictatorship in history to crush any remaining protest against the Washington-based corporate oligarchy. Fear of a good example of worker justice drives all American foreign policy not centered on stealing oil. This is what happened in Cuba, Vietnam, and Grenada as well.
Pinochet came to power in the same way many come to power in a “People’s Goverment” or “Worker’s Paradise”. The people who are visionaries must prosecute their enemies vigorously (yes this means eliminate them), or they are thrown down by people who seek to gather to themselves more power. This simple fact is why Communism will never ever work. You need a totalitarian government to achieve true, ideal communism, and once that government has power, and gives power and privileges to people, those people and their heirs and lackeys never want to give up that power. One of the few quotes Joe Stalin ever said that I will agree with is, “No people, no problem”. It is fact that our founders set up a very limited government in order to make sure that people could not ever accumulate the power that today’s politicians have, and it is a tribute to them that we have lasted as long as we have without any kind of military/ crazy radical coup.
Ahhh, a True Believer! How quaint!
“Salvador Allende tried to create a compassionate, democratic society in Chile that truly provided justice to workers and the poor”
If you say so. What he WAS was a Marxist who, as soon as he was in office, began expropriating private property from its rightful owners…stealing. And to further this end, he was seeking to forge close ties with the Soviet Union and Cuba,(are you going to argue that those two regimes created “compassionate, democratic societies that truly provided justice to workers and the poor”? Let me know if you are so I can grab a bucket to puke into after I finish laughing.)
“Since this would provide a good example for American workers, the CIA set up the stooge Pinochet…”
Uh-huh. And of course the native Chileans, whose property he was ALSO extorting at gunpoint, had absolutely NOTHING to do with this “regime change”, is that it? It was all the CIA’s doing?
God, but how you Leftist livestock worship the all-powerful and omniscient CIA!
But riddle me this, moonbat: how is it that a middle-class White boy from California can convert to Islam and attend a madrassah or two in Pakistan, join the Mooj in Afghanistan, and get face-time with Osama bin-Laden, while the CIA can;t even find out which holes in the ground he’s using as a pied-a-terre?
“Fear of a good example of worker justice drives all American foreign policy not centered on stealing oil. This is what happened in Cuba, Vietnam, and Grenada as well.”
C’mon, this is a good put-on, but you need to not lay it on so thick, man.
too much gravy spoils the meatloaf.
The point about Sal Allende is that he tried moving his nation Leftward FAR too quickly, and the classes of people whom he was despoiling, struck back.
Specifically with widespread trucking company “lock-outs”.
Long before Mr. Hawkins’ “Tipping Point” gets reached, the folks getting the bill for the Alleged Hawaiian’s, (and his cronies’) neo-Marxist dreams are going to likewise strike back.
Imagine what will happen to our country if, say, energy companies, (and by no means am I talking just oil), simply decide to stop selling their products in any given state or region…or nationwide.
What do you think happened in your dear departed East Bloc and Soviet Union?
When the coal miners said “FU, comrade!”, the whole thing came tumbling down.
Anyway, see you in the surveillance photos…
“But riddle me this, moonbat: how is it that a middle-class White boy from California can convert to Islam and attend a madrassah or two in Pakistan, join the Mooj in Afghanistan, and get face-time with Osama bin-Laden, while the CIA can;t even find out which holes in the ground he’s using as a pied-a-terre?”
Because Osama Bin Laden is their scapegoat for the 911 event. They have no real incentive to stop him or any of his followers. Why has the mainstream media not investigated “the company” for its own role in that incident. Why have we not heard about them or the FBI for their connections to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, or Robert Kennedy? Why do we continue believe their story that it was a weather balloon that crashed on that fateful day in Roswell back in ’47?
“Why have we not heard about them or the FBI for their connections to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, or Robert Kennedy? Why do we continue believe their story that it was a weather balloon that crashed on that fateful day in Roswell back in ‘47?”
Is there a concession stand nearby? I want some popcorn for this guided tour inside the carnival fun-house that approximates the twisted mind of a Marxist moonbat.
The writer has a defeat algorithym causing a voltage spike in his disgronifier. Why isn’t he CELEBRATING? If 51% of the country doesn’t pay, next they won’t bother to file. Oh, DON’T FILE you say? –How can I get my refund? Aha! …so you mean that 51% have undergone “stupification” and don’t see that 1/3 of their paycheck is still missing, and 22% of everything they buy is pure tax. Meanwhile the rag-tag middle class and evil rich have opted out of FICA and withholding, which is reason enought to hate them, or at least engage in a bit of self-loathing. One thing is correct, tho; 51% IS a tipping point –the point at which they become total tax slaves, with no hope of escape. Enter the hero, FairTax. The citizen’s bill to REPEAL & REPLACE the Income Tax with one that THEY decide whether to pay or not (preferring not of course,). FairTax opens the jail and stops punishing productivity, so people can immediately pull themselves out of the IRS gulag. There IS NO form to file, No withholding, so you keep ALL of YOUR money, and jobs soar! One hitch: you DO pay (some) tax –23% but at least you get to see and decide on every dime, instead of having the government TAKE it by STEALth. Then, you won’t be paying 30% off your pay, 22% more in what you buy, and told that the government is giving you a gift (horse).
We are fast approaching our nation’s doom, that’s what we’re fast approaching. The stuff covered in this post reminds us that we are on the verge of positioning a majority of our society to live off the labors of a minority: not a minority by race, but a minority by numbers. In other words – 51% of the people will soon live off the labor and ingenuity of 49% of the people. Freedom cannot live in that environment.
Don’t worry, it’s self limiting. See Hauser’s law or empirical observation: no matter the marginal tax rates (whether 90% or 20%) on the tax paying classes, federal tax revenues since WW2 have equaled 20% of GDP. There are limits to carving up the GDP pie. In the last analysis, one can grow the pie, or it’s get ugly as people quit producing, or move elsewhere. Curiously, 20@ of the people who pay no taxes are single females with babies now supported by married females with babies, and the other 30% are “illegals” and low income “green” workers whose jobs have been exported offshore.
This is a letter that today was emailed to me by the obama boys which, prior to my authorization to forward I made some minor changes in for the purpose of making some more salient points. If you ever receive these emails, realize you can modify them for syntax and content. Here goes.
As an American affected by the financial crisis, and a consumer who seeks protections from the worst abuses of the Obama administration, from hiring tax cheats to head the IRS, to jamming runaway spending measures down our throats, to destroying the best health care system in the world, I have a simple request:
Please join me in requesting that comrade Obama resign forthwith.
The soon-to-be-pending impeachment bill in the Senate designed to remove President Obama is the product of bipartisan negotiations. It will create the strongest affect if all sign the petition for Obama’s departure. Over the next three years, he will have saddled our children each with a $150,000 debt. Totaling 17 trillion dollars. The Obama spending train is fast-tracking this country right into bankruptcy.
I urge you to listen to those Senate Republicans who are willing to work across party lines — and to stand with the moderate Democrats against an Obama who’s out to destroy this nation along with all the ideals upon which it was founded.
Sincerely, rach
More Tea Parties, more grassroots in every way, so that we hold Republicans’ feet to the fire. That’s the short term and necessary solution here.
The Tea parties are not a short term solution, but a long term one. Lobbyists and people on the left who have been actively protesting for years are the ones getting their way in the world right now, because of decades of grassroots having grown into a great organization which is very effective at promoting itself as mainstream, while holding very radical views. In order to expose this and correct errors in “facts” that many people are taught, we must be vigilante always, not just temporarily.
Well I guess this article proves the point. Folks have been argueing for years and years that big corporations should pay taxes just like their employees. Working people and good citizens and our even our poor citizens have always had to pay taxes, even when we earned less than 50 bucks a week !!
However, at the local, state and federal level successive legislatures have attracted companies and bowed to big oil and other corporate dynasties and have given them special tax breaks in return for “hiring” a few people and “promising” to stay around for a few years. The policiy was: the bigger the company, the less tax they have to pay. And Senate Republicans have been wanting to continue this policy. A corporate tax free policy that American taxpayers have to ante up for. This is a great shame, but at least now, the trend has slowed and the big companies and the banks are finally being called out on it. Lets hope they start paying their fair share soon, just like the rest of us….for once..!
“This is a great shame, but at least now, the trend has slowed and the big companies and the banks are finally being called out on it. Lets hope they start paying their fair share soon, just like the rest of us….for once..!”
Like I said…I get these visions of Allende…
What you apparently are obdurately refusing to recognize is the undisputed economic fact that business pass along their costs to their consumers.
What this MEANS, moonbat, is that “business taxes” are just a ruse to further extract wealth from citizens.
Y’see, the OTHER thing you fail to glom to is that the costs that are passed through to their consumers are not indexed to the customers’ income level…or anything but the business’s cost and how high a margin they can charge and still stay competitive AND profitable.
And THAT means that people WITHOUT he means just have to do without whatever good or service that business is selling.
This is where the Lady Ga-Ga music comes in.
I’ve heard this same song from the likes of you half-witted neo-Marxists over and over and over and over and over…..
Corporations do not pay taxes. Only individuals pay taxes. Corporations collect taxes by passing the cost down to the consumer. I don’t understand how people don’t get that.
College educations?
Beats the heck outta me.
Liberals tend to believe that somewhere there is a pot of money that will pay for all their dreams. If only they could find the right boogeyman to tax. They also tend to believe in unicorns and free lunches.
A college professor in the early 1990′s regularly warned the class that all of this was coming. He warned us over and over that the entitlement mentality would eventually overwhelm the US economy and bring it crashing down. Some of us took him seriously, some laughed at him, most were too busy planning parties and trying to hook up to listen at all. Small wonder then that we are in this fix, particuarly if you consider all of 5 various economics classes (all elective) were offered there, but nearly 30 athletic courses ( with 4 hours required to graduate)and still more remedial English and Math courses were offered.
I’m not so sure it is as bleak as all that.
Is there any sort of study to show what percentage of the 47% who do not pay taxes actually vote? At a guess, I would be surprised if the non-taxpaying half of our country votes in the same percentages as the tax-paying portion.
How to get more poor people to vote?
Answer: ACORN and lots of COMMUNITY ORGANIZING.
The collapse won’t come because 51% pay no income tax, it’ll come when a % of the 49% decide that their lifestyle isn’t worth the 60-80 hour weeks and the Blackberry buzzing all the time. My wife and cut our income roughly in half over the last several years, starting when we paid the morgage off. We don’t need the money, and if someone else does they can go to work and earn it just the way I did.
Isn’t it strange that getting something for ‘free’ doesn’t solve the root problem of ‘envy’ and wanting/needing/desiring ‘more and more and more and…’?
Is it really ‘security’ if you haven’t earned it? If what you have isn’t really ‘yours’ to begin with then what you ‘have’ can be taken away at any time… How is that security?
People don’t even have any shame any longer over their openly green-eyed natures.
Work ethic? Who in their right mind is going to want to work any more if they are punished for trying to take care of themselves?
Duplicity is the new transparency I s’pose.
UNCLE!
AOL,you need an education. Thinking like that is part of the problem
Dr. Jerry Pournelle predicted this particular state of affairs in his series of future histories known as the “Codominium and Empire of Man” books.
In those books the shrinking class of “Taxpayers” grimly held on to their privileges and the “citizens” were kept in line through free booze and free drugs in their “welfare islands” outside the cities while the government was in Pournelle’s words “a self perpetuating oligarchy.”
Does any of this sound familiar at all?
Prescient no?
As to whether or not corporations pay taxes or not — it is correct that companies pass their tax costs on to the consumer — I certainly did when I had my own business. However, as usual that doesn’t tell the whole tale.
If the corporate tax rate is 35% then consumer prices are at LEAST 35% higher than they have to be. Simple as that. No businessman is in business to lose money. And any business man with a brain would like to lower prices while still maintaining his profit margin. Why? because then he sells more and makes more money.
This is why I had to make at least 60% profit, while walmart is happy with 2% or less.
It’s common sense folks.
Patrick
#14 Thane36425 — A college professor in the early 1990’s regularly warned the class that all of this was coming.
He was channeling futurists like Alvin Toffler who predicted all this back in the late 60′s and early 70′s. Add a sprig of various sci-fi insights (such as Pournelle, who discusses the same problem as per comment #19.)
One problem involves a service economy and the IQ bell curve. Factories used to be able to employ millions, but no so much any more. Many jobs worth doing these days require special education (right side of the bell curve) and the available job pool for the left side of the curve is shrinking. Modern factories are full of industrial robots and the people needed to keep the robots running are NOT the bell curve’s left side (i.e. the lowC-D-F students.) There are still good paying non-college jobs like plumbers, but how many plumbers can we keep employed?
The point is that blaming this on Obama is ludicrous, and the tax tipping point will come regardless of who the president is. It’s about jobs, who can do them, who can’t, and how we’re going to fix that problem. What we need is about 20 million factory jobs. And this problem is going to get worse.
I’d say instead that we’d be 51% of the way to the right solution. Its time to repeal the 19th amendment and do away with the federal income tax altogether.
Since EVERYONE I know (or their household) pays taxes, I find the 47% figure hard to believe. Most of us feel lucky that we have a job (or a pension), which is the reason we also pay taxes.