End income tax, starve the beast

It is your money, not the government’s

West Virginia is trying to scrape its state income tax off its shoe. Governor (and future senator) Jim Justice wanted to slice the overall tax by 5% in light of a $2.3 billion surplus. The Legislature passed a puny 2% cut in a pre-election special session.

The 5% cut would have let people keep $100 million of the money they earn each year.

WOWK reported:

Democrats worried a 5% cut would lead to financial cuts to critical state programs, but Gov. Justice disagreed and said the state could afford the tax cuts.

“When you give that $100 million back to the people of West Virginia, they’re going to spend it here. And the multiplier effect on that hundred million will turn into ten times, will turn into a billion,” Gov. Justice said last week.

“So, I really think it would be up to the new governor and the new legislature to make a policy decision as grave as this,” State Sen. Mike Woelfel (D-Cabell — Minority Leader) said last week.

The personal income tax in the state has been cut by 25% over the past two years.

Some of that money went back to Don Surber, a kindly old man in Poca who in turn spent his 25% cut on Nunyadam — as in None of Your Damn Business.

In 2016, Justice — a Democrat — supported Donald Trump. The Republican candidate did not. Justice won and later became a Republican. The state really did not flip Republican until 2014 when it elected its first Republican-led legislature in 84 years.

Seven states have no state income tax: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming.

Investopedia reported, “In addition, Washington levies an income tax on investment income and capital gains, but it is only for certain high earners. Elsewhere, New Hampshire currently taxes investment and interest income but is set to phase out those taxes starting in 2023. That will bring the number of the 50 states with no income tax to nine by 2027.”

State income taxes are small compared to the ravenous federal income tax which gobbles more than $2 trillion a year from the nation’s economy, or roughly 10% of the GDP.

Trump wants to dump the federal income tax. I do too because it is the most powerful and corrupt tool used by the government. The tax code is used to punish earners, reward the workless through tax credits and pay back political donors through an endless stream of tax loopholes.

It is your money, not the government’s. If Americans keeping $2 trillion of the money they earn causes problems for the government, that is the government’s problem and not ours. We elect these geniuses to Congress. Let them figure out what to cut because they were the ones who pumped the air into the balloon we call the federal government.

The power to tax is twofold as the government has the power not only to punish but to forgive. Only God should have such powers.

Government employees worship the income tax. The feds did not get Al Capone for his murders or for making booze. He went to prison for tax evasion. Eliot Ness worked for the Treasury Department, not the FBI. The message was clear to the Mafia and the like: Do as you wish but you must pay the troll.

Lincoln had the first income tax to finance the civil war.

The IRS says that the tax “levied a 3% tax on incomes between $600 and $10,000 and a 5% tax on incomes of more than $10,000.”

7 years after the war ended, a Republican Congress and President Grant finally ended the tax.

Democrat Grover Cleveland brought it back in 1894 in the midst of the Panic of 1893, a devastating depression that in some ways rivaled the Great Depression. The Supreme Court spiked Cleveland’s tax as being unconstitutional.

This led to the 16th Amendment, which was the only time the politicians used the amendment process to overturn the Supreme Court. The income tax passed just in time to finance World War I.

The income tax also made Prohibition possible.

13 years ago, Joseph Bishop-Henchman of the Tax Foundation wrote, “Prohibition lasted from 1919 to 1933. One of the stumbling blocks advocates of Prohibition faced before 1913 was that the federal government was heavily dependent on taxes on alcohol. The passage of the income tax constitutional amendment that year allowed government the luxury of banning alcohol without reducing tax revenue.”

When Prohibition ended, the income tax stayed on. The government went back to collecting taxes on booze, too. These two taxes helped finance a government that grew into a multi-trillion-dollar spending machine that now regulates just about every human activity in America.

For example, the federal government used your income taxes to finance its takeover of public schools in the 1970s by pumping trillions of dollars into the system. The result a half-century later Johnny not only can’t read but he doesn’t even know what sex he is.

Now, 91 years after Prohibition ended, a president finally is willing to scrap the income tax. The New York Times is shocked.

NYT reported, “In June, Mr. Trump floated the idea of replacing federal revenue from income taxes with money received from tariffs. Mr. Trump has not provided specific details of how that would work, and it is unclear if he wants to eliminate all federal taxes, including corporate income taxes and payroll taxes, or only end the individual income tax.

“Either way, both liberal and conservative experts have dismissed his idea as mathematically impossible and economically destructive. Even if Republicans control Congress, lawmakers are unlikely to dismantle the income tax system. Yet Mr. Trump’s combination of tax cuts and tariff increases has been central to his political pitch.”

Experts. They are the same nuts who told us a cloth mask could stop a virus and that a Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough called ivermectin was just horse paste.

When it comes to economics, the only experts I need are Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Trump has made three sound proposals for immediate changes to the income tax.

1. Not taxing tips does more to help the poor than that welfare we call the Earned Income Tax Credit because instead of an EITC handout, the ban on taxes keeps the government’s hands out of a waitresses pocket.

2. Not taxing Social Security does more to help retirees, widows and orphans, and the disabled than any one government program.

3. Not taxing overtime gives workers actual time-and-a-half for overtime. As it stands now, that half goes to the government in the form of income taxes. To hell with that.

Getting rid of the whole darned tax is the ultimate goal.

NYT whined, “Replacing income taxes with tariffs would reverse the progressivity of the tax system in the United States. In general, income taxes are progressive, meaning that Americans with more income pay a higher tax rate. Tariffs, which impose a tax on products imported into the United States, are regressive. They raise the prices on imported items like clothing and groceries, placing a larger burden on lower-income Americans who spend a bigger percentage of their income on those goods.”

Who said “progressivity of the tax system” is a good thing? We built this economy in the 19th century on protective tariffs, not income taxes and tax credits. Let’s go back to what worked because what we have today is a large bloated empire dependent on slaves in Asia for every product we consume.

Two polls today.