Sponsored by more than 20 different Kentucky and national groups, organizations and businesses, the Bluegrass Institute’s Tax Freedom Day on April 18th brought around 1,000 people to Lexington, Kentucky to express their concerns about the country’s current fiscal direction.
This first set of video highlights features comments from three of the event’s great speakers and some of the great signs concerned private citizens created.
Hint – Keep a watchful eye out for the full set of tax codes we are expected to comply with every year. You won’t believe the enormous bulk of this documentary package – no wonder even IRS folks don’t fully understand this “stuff.”
And, check back for still more to come.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Bluegrass Institute’s Tax Freedom Day – Huge Success
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5 comments:
If you call a scam a success, then you're right.
However, you deliberately misinform the people to advance your feudalistic agenda.
The Tax Foundation only looks at taxes as a percentage of the total economy. But that doesn’t take into account the reality of the average family.
Because the federal tax system is progressive, the share of income that most Americans pay in federal taxes is considerably lower than the overall level of revenues as a share of total national income.
In fact, about 80 percent of U.S. households pay federal tax at rates lower than the Tax Foundation’s reported average, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
But the even more fundamental fallacy is that people spend part of the year working for “the government” and the rest of the year working for themselves and their families.
Government tax dollars also serve you and your family — or at least they should. Conservatives use rhetorical gimmicks like “Tax Freedom Day” to drive a wedge between government and the people (but use government to serve their friends and supporters).
Progressives work to make sure government serves the public good. There’s no need to declare a “tax freedom day”; we need to stay focused on making sure government works as it should for all of us.
Since you have no empathy for the ideals and values of America's founders, your definition of success is to oppose the public good, which means having good government.
Also, the effective tax rate of businesses in the US is among the lowest in the world.
Hempy,
You are not listening to what people are saying at those tax parties.
I’m not our tax expert, but even I understand some of the issues being pointed out.
One of those issues is that the taxes we pay include far more than the income tax. Many of those other taxes hit the poor hard.
The first tax passed by the new administration was on cigarettes. It was a substantial hike. It hits the poor abnormally hard because they are more likely to smoke than other groups.
And, inflation, which is bound to happen following huge deficit spending we are currently incurring, will also hit the poor very dramatically.
Corporate taxes also hit the poor in one of two general ways. Taxes increase the costs of everything the poor buy (assuming the company can still stay in business by passing the tax along to the consumer). Or worse, corporate taxes help to destroy poor citizens’ jobs when those corporations become economically overwhelmed and can no longer compete against foreign competition.
You accuse the Bluegrass Institute of being locked in a feudal mentality, but my easy counter is that you have failed to learn from the much more relevant history of the failure of socialistic and communistic theories over the past 100 years.
The US has had economic downturns in the past, but we always recovered.
The economic messes in the old Soviet Union and elsewhere only started to reverse when the countries involved moved on to more capitalistic economies.
Richard:
The cigarette tax increase was a state tax--not federal. The tea-bagging parties were aimed at Obama, with many references trying to link him with Hitler.
Deficit spending doesn't necessarily trigger inflation. Bush's deficit spending triggered one of the worst recessions we've seen since Hoover's Great Depression.
As said in the previous post, the effective tax on business is among the world's lowest. If any cost increases are added, that's because businesses decide that the market will support their increases.
It was in 1998 when the Russian stock market lost 93 percent of its value in a matter of weeks. So much for their capitalistic economies.
Obama isn't following socialistic or communistic theories on economics. It's Keynesian, which is based upon Adam Smith's and Alexander Hamilton's economic philosophies. Hamilton drew much of his ideas from Smith.
What Bluegrass Institute is preaching is nothing more than feudalism that's more concerned about taking care of the lord of the manor, just like the Bush administration took care of Enron. That's the so-called "capitalism" the Bluegrass Institute preaches.
Hempy, you are not properly informed on this subject, but it's not hard to understand why.
Aside from Kentucky's tobacco tax increase, the Feds also raised tobacco taxes. It was the first tax-related bill President Obama signed.
The increase was buried in SCHIP legislation. See this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123414187016161821.html and this http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?hint=3&DR_ID=56811.
Most of the major media didn't give this much coverage, as far as I can tell from a Google search - Just another reason to keep on reading the Blogs, where the real news coverage increasingly seems to be happening.
Thanks for the info about the federal tobacco tax increase. I agree with the sentiments expressed in the article about "sin" taxes, or more technically, sumptuary taxes--a medieval taxing concept.
That's why I favor Alexander Hamilton's proportional tax on the movement of moneys. It would cast a wider net, and would function more like a toll on the economic highway.
Hence, whenever there was a movement of money including goods and services, a proportional rate toll would be levied on that movement.
That would snag bank-laundered drug money, estimated to be about $1.5 trillion a year, the $531 trillion derivatives market, stock transactions, estate transfers and day-to-day purchases. The revenue generated by this method should be sufficient to eliminate all other taxes.
That I'll leave to the revenue folks to figure out.
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