The income tax was envisioned as a means of paying for government services. The IRS has been transformed into the Internal Redistribution Service that facilitates the appropriation and redistribution of our money in a variety of ways; among them bailouts, earmarks, subsidies, grants, and welfare via the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
President Obama in a recent press conference referred to tax cuts as government spending. This mindset is a misguided progressive view of the role of government that assumes the peoples’ money belongs to the government. Not one journalist asked the pertinent question: “Whose money is it?”
Americans are by nature beneficent and the most charitable people on the planet yet the most productive of us are being admonished for not caring enough and not paying our “fair share” of taxes. The truth is that the top 10 percent of taxpayers pay 70 percent of the taxes. Almost 48 percent of U.S. citizens pay no income tax and over 30 percent of those receive welfare in the form of EITC.
The government is depleting our wealth by borrowing and spending at an unsustainable rate. It has run out of other peoples’ money and its enforced benevolence has impoverished us to the brink of bankruptcy.
What is incomprehensible and alarming is the number of people who deny or are oblivious to the peril and challenges we face.
Ed Konecnik
Flushing
