I want to make sure. I will post more in a week or so.
289, I remembered, and I had a large pizza (anchovies, Canadian bacon and olives) but no booze. Taxes, which I always postpone to the last minutes because I ALWAYS owe (why should I loan my money to this fucking government?), and which stress me out. If average Americans had to pay the way I do, with full knowledge of how much money I could have kept, and would have kept if we had not been trained like beasts of burden to accept the theft of a third of our income, then I think we would have a much larger tax revolt than we already have.
Let’s say you make $50,000. $7,500 of that is taken for Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid (you only see 7.5% because your employer pays the other half, but that is money which competition for employees would otherwise cause to go to you, since it is a fixed expense either way), and you have NO RIGHT to that money. You pay this year after year after year, and when you hit 65, if you die, your wife gets none of it. Your children get none of it. Because in reality, all you did was fund current expenditures. There is no “lock box”, like Al Gore talked about 19 years ago. You paid out of your sweat for 30-40 years, and none of it is yours. This by actual court decision.
Then of course you have local and State and regular Federal income taxes on top of that. If you are a business owner, you might add to this half a dozen more taxes, particularly if you do work regionally. And of course you pay Sales tax on everything. You pay property taxes on your home, which continue even after you own it, in most jurisdictions. It’s crazy.
Most of us are well trained monkeys, incapable of understanding the abusiveness of what is happening around us.