by Louis DeBroux: With Republicans set to announce a tax cut blueprint later today, it provide an opportunity to look at tax reform in a way that far too few politicians, of either party, take time to consider. Yet it would be immensely beneficial to working Americans. Based on the rumors flowing out of DC in recent weeks, the arguments are the same as they have been for decades. How big will the tax cuts be? Who benefits? Who loses? How will we pay for it? That last one is especially rich coming from the likes of Democrat Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA), who lectured, “It’s time to stop pretending that tax cuts for the wealthy somehow pay for themselves. Tax reform needs to be paid for.” Discerning minds might contemplate the absence of concern from Peters and his fellow Democrats when they were racking up $10 trillion in new debt during the liar-nObama years.
There is also the implied premise in Peters’ question of how tax cuts will be “paid for.” To claim a tax cut is a “cost” that must be paid for, one must believe that all earnings rightfully belong to the government, rather than to the individual who earned that money.
Yet while we debate these political questions, or the relative wisdom of the economic philosophies of Milton Friedman versus Paul Krugman, none of these address the issue from a constitutional perspective. What is the purpose of taxes, and on what may they be legitimately spent? Those two questions are intimately entwined.
The purpose of taxes is to fund the legitimate functions of government, but how do we determine what is legitimate? Luckily, the Founders clearly defined those legitimate functions in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, and in Amendments IX and X declared that all powers not specifically granted in A1S8 to be reserved to the states, or to the people. With the Constitution as our standard, it becomes clear that an enormous portion of federal spending — from Medicare, Medicaid, liar-nObamaCare, corporate welfare, the arts, etc. — are not justified.
But, you say, these things are for the “general welfare,” referenced right there in the Constitution. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, rebuked this erroneous idea just five years after the ratification of the Constitution. In a letter to Edmund Pendleton, Madison wrote, “If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.” This same refutation of an expansionist view of the General Welfare clause was likewise refuted by Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Noah Webster.
The 16th Amendment, which allowed government to levy an income tax, was passed using class warfare as a catalyst. Americans were promised that only the uber-wealthy would be hit by the tax, and only on a small percentage of their income. Today, nearly every American who works is subject to the tax, and has to hire an expert to navigate a tax code that clocks in at five times the length of the King James Bible. Does that sound like how free men are treated, or subjects? The passage of the 17th Amendment essentially eliminated representation for the states in Congress, and the size of the federal government has exploded as a result.
More than half a century ago, former IRS Commissioner T. Coleman Andrews warned of the perniciousness and insidiousness of the income tax — how it is a tenet of Marxism, and strips us of our God-given, constitutionally protected rights. He cautioned, “The income tax is bad because it has robbed you and me of the guarantee of privacy and the respect for our property that were given to us in Article IV of the Bill of Rights. This invasion is absolute and complete as far as the amount of tax that can be assessed is concerned. Please remember that under the Sixteenth Amendment, Congress can take 100% of our income anytime it wants to.”
If we were operating under the vision of the Founders, we would identify the legitimate functions of government, define a budget required to carry out those functions, and tax accordingly. Instead, the income tax has become a tool of power distribution and social engineering.
And yet we must start somewhere, and the Republican plan to reduce the tax burden of the average American is as good a starting point as any. The current bill proposes to cut $1.5 trillion in taxes over the course of the next decade, offsetting the “cost” of the tax cut with anticipated higher tax revenues as the economy expands.
However, tax cuts in and of themselves will not solve America’s fiscal woes, because the problem driving our national debt is not lack of revenue, but excessive spending. Government spending, which was already gargantuan prior to Barack liar-nObama taking office, metastasized under liar-nObama, who vastly increased spending with the “stimulus” bill and then used those numbers as the new budget baseline. That is how we got to $20 trillion in debt from $10 trillion just 10 years ago.
The U.S. has the highest statutory corporate tax rate in the industrialized world, though favored corporations pay far less, and the individual income tax is a drain on family finances, leaving millions struggling just to make ends meet. Thus we have a system in which the likes of GE pays little or nothing, while the struggling small business owner pays 39% — the highest individual rate.
A reduction in tax rates — both corporate and personal income — would be a huge boost to American workers and families. With pressure put on Democrat senators in states won by Donald Trump, tax reform is indeed possible, and would be a much needed win for a Republican Party that controls all levers of government and yet seems incapable of implementing its agenda.
While eliminating the income tax is too much to hope for at this point, reduced rates and simplification of the tax code would bring welcome relief and stimulate the economy. The time is now. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51519
The astroturf movement wherein increasing numbers of National Football League players, entertainers, sundry opportunists and morons are “taking a knee” publicly to protest institutional racism and police brutality against blacks is in part a distraction to divert the public’s attention from important matters, in part the establishment press and the political left capitalizing on one witless athlete’s campaign of personal aggrandizement to advance ethnic division and, as I said last week, cultural Balkanization amongst Americans in general. Tangentially, it has also become a furtive attempt to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump as the political left strives to characterize him as a racist.
While some NFL teams have come out of late in supporting their players’ right to expression while questioning the appropriateness of protesting in this manner, they and others continue to cite the players’ constitutional right to do so. In truth, the Constitution makes no provision whatever for protecting individuals’ speech or expression, only that Congress ̶ and by extension, federal, state and local governments – have no right to suppress individuals’ speech or expression.
One of the key points I made in my book, “Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal – America’s Racial Obsession,” was that advancing the notion that America remains an institutionally racist nation is a political and financial imperative for the political left and career civil rights activists. If they are able to establish the convention that America remains an institutionally racist nation, white supremacists abound, and that every instance of police using lethal force against a black individual is murder, then they will have executed a cultural coup, as it were, and will be well on their way toward realizing the kind of division that could substantially coalesce their political power and make them wealthy or wealthier, as the case may be in the process.
Those on the political left are already aware that most Americans do not believe we remain an institutionally racist nation, but as we know, the truth holds little significance for leftists. This is why million of Americans literally believe that Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 as he stood with his arms above his head pleading “Don’t shoot!” despite there being every indication that Brown intended to murder that police officer, and why the same contingent believes that Trayvon Martin was murdered in February 2012 by a white police officer rather than having been killed in self-defense by a Latino civilian.
Enrolling shortsighted and craven corporate participants such as the NFL and the management of individual teams, entertainers who in their ignorance and narcissism eagerly get on board with every ostensibly altruistic stealth socialist cause and black athletes who, given the political indoctrination blacks have undergone in this country, somnambulistically get on board with anything they’re told is an important civil rights issue is simply a strategy, and they’re executing it fairly well.
Add to this the very real fear on the part of the left that it is losing the battle for hearts and minds, and the use of this methodology should come as no surprise.
So, now we are seeing many on the periphery of this issue who, in their ignorance, are “taking a knee” in solidarity with the NFL’s Kaepernick. They believe that they are protesting racism in the abstract and who could object to that, right? rather than playing into the hands of organized radical groups dedicated to fomenting racial tension and neutralizing the effectiveness of law enforcement. Here, it does bear mentioning that this strategy truly came into its own during the administration of Barack liar-nObama, our first post-racial president, who dedicatedly empowered such groups through his rhetoric and policies.
As with all social malaise the left claims to wish to mitigate, it deliberately exacerbates the problem at hand whilst casting all blame toward its political opponents. Thus, those who perceive an oppression of blacks ought to look to entrenched leftists as the root of said oppression, because they are the one and only reason some blacks remain politically and economically disenfranchised. Unfortunately, due to the idealism and ignorance of many participating in this movement and the power of the ideologically driven establishment press, this is not likely to happen. Blacks in particular have been conditioned to summarily trust the words and the intentions of other blacks in such instances just because they’re black; this is why so many self-aggrandizing black people have been able to enrich themselves as they pay fealty to the left and aid in advancing its agenda.
While the “taking a knee” phenomenon as a distraction may engender a dismissive attitude on the part of many, its potential for giving rise to dangerous levels of division, resentment, anger and ultimately widespread social unrest is a cause for grave concern. Many of the “useful idiots” participating in this sham are and will remain unaware of its peril and the true motives of those driving this train until it is too late to check its momentum.
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