Man, our news media is really off on a tangent. We now have 47% and 1% and some percent of that percent and everybody seems to be hosing our Government, or so it is reported, with non-payment of taxes or underpayment of said taxes. People, the damn tax code is so screwed up that even the IRS doesn’t know what the hell is going on. Now do you blame people for taking advantage of tax loop holes in the Code? No, I don’t. I don’t care what you make in income as long as it is honest. This is like saying, well, you owe $22,000 in taxes and it can be reduced to $12,000 if you take advantage of A and B and C. Now what rocket-scientist is going to send a check to the IRS for $22,000 when he or she can take advantage of deductions, exclusions, special circumstances, income averaging, on and on?
Now the media knows that an investor with several hundred thousands of dollars in bonds and stocks or derivatives, earns their income on those investments. They follow the tax code as it is written. The media, however, compares this individual with a construction worker filing a return whose tax percentage ends up being a higher percentage than the investor. They claim that this is wrong as George our construction worker paid 17% tax versus the investor that paid 13%. It is an incorrect comparison but it sells magazines and papers.
And to make it worse, the media dwells on the percentage of either senior citizens or families with children making less than $50,000 dollars in annual income that pay no Federal Taxes. Again, folks, this is our tax code and these folks are not being victimized and are surely not criminals. Sure, we have 46.3 million people on food stamps and guess who set the guidelines? You guessed it – the Government.
Our tax code is now over 9,097,000 words. The directions for a typical form 1040 totals a mere 161 pages! The “EZ” version is 41 pages. The IRS employed 90,647 people in 2008 with operating costs of $11,207,223,000 billion dollars. If we simplified the tax code, many of these IRS employees could go into more productive lines of work and we could save billions of dollars in taxpayer money.
Now our beloved Congressional leaders left Washington today to go back to their districts and campaign for re-election. Maybe someone should ask them why they are not addressing the core issues facing this country. Our priorities are really screwed up. We write countless arguments and rehash non-important issues like John and Mary who make $43,000 a year with two children and pay no Federal income tax while GE pays $1.5 million dollars in tax on an income of $15,000,000,000 billion dollars.
