Gentlemen,
We’re probably not going to change the system without a civil war. What all of you fail to mention is the number of people who vote but do not pay taxes. What incentive do those folks have to limit the size of government or its tax burden? Why should they care? They’re not paying for it so why shouldn’t they have everything the government can provide and damn the costs?
The vote of the fattest, laziest housing-project ghetto scumbag counts just as much as that of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. Problem is there are a lot more ghetto scumbags than there are billionaire capitalists. Remember Econ 101? “Wants are unlimited, while means are limited.”
I own rental property. I used to have higher rents and include utility costs in that rent. I stopped doing that after about two years. My tenants simply had no concern about the costs of electricity, gas or water as long as I was paying the bills and the bills were astronomical. It was amazing to see how much those bills went down once the tenants had to pay for their usage themselves. I’d NEVER own a rental property and include utility costs again. People just don’t care when they don’t have to pay.
If you follow that thread you come to the point where you either have to disenfranchise lots of the poor or push the tax burden downward. Neither party wants anything to do with either of those alternatives. However, as long as the taxpaying segment of the nation continues to shrink relative to the national population as a whole, you’re going to have an ever increasing free-rider problem.
What that will mean is more tax avoidance, more tax evasion, and more draconian tax laws. It wasn’t an accident that Charlie Rangel and Co. in this Congress passed a law that levies a 45% tax on assets of U.S. citizens who renounce their citizenship and leave the country. They know more and heavier taxation is coming and they wanted to make sure no one could escape without them getting their pound of flesh first.
I don’t have a solution for the problems I’m posing. I do know what needs to happen, however. One of the smartest men in America, Thomas Sowell, once said that “there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” He’s right. Let me give you an example of one that is surely coming: Social Security.
The tradeoff for “fixing” Social Security’s impending bankruptcy will be what the British call “means-testing.” That means that at some point, to keep the system solvent, it won’t matter how much any individual has paid into it; if that individual has more than some arbitrary, government-decreed level of assets/income, they will no longer be eligible for it. The justification, of course, will be that “the system has to be preserved for those who REALLY need it.”
Will that be extraordinarily unfair? Yes. Will those who lose in this new arrangement have any real recourse? No; the costs of fighting the decision will be much greater than disgustedly capitulating. I’ll leave to the reader the exercise of determining just what race and gender will lose most in that action, and how much sympathy they’ll receive.
To be honest, I fear for my country and my children. I’m seriously considering moving overseas permanently.
