GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Taking your money at gunpoint

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You pay taxes because the government forces you to. The only differences between taxation and robbery are:

  1. The government makes it legal (when they do it).
  2. The government has more window-dressing or layers of deception. For example, they’ll say that you pay taxes voluntarily. (Which is deception, because they will jail you and/or your banker if you don’t pay; and shoot you if you resist jail.)

In Seminole County, FL, they just got a little more honest. Seminole County tax collector will allow employees to carry guns.

Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg told the Orlando Sentinel that according to Florida law, he and his employees are considered “revenue officers” and are exempt from the state’s ban on the open carrying of firearms while performing their duties…

He said 15 to 20 employees will be allowed to carry firearms. Greenberg said no one will be forced to carry a weapon, adding that he “can’t imagine that they wouldn’t want to.”

The citizens, by contrast, can’t carry guns. So now the tax collectors are armed, and the citizens aren’t. (Whereas before, they met on slightly more equal terms and had to bring the police in for any physical disputes.) Roman empire, here we come!

State budget crises

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These seem to be popping up. For decades, State public pensions have been under-funded and overly-generous. The bill is coming due. Bloomberg has a map:

Gray means nothing good. California, for example, has under-funded its pensions by $1 trillion – or $93,000 per household – which is worse than Illinois.

The big crisis of the moment is Illinois. They have not enacted a budget in 3 years, have $15 billion in unpaid bills, and a court just ordered them to make some large Medicaid payments they had been skipping. In consequence, the Democrat legislature has passed tax hikes – that the Republican governor has vowed to veto, at least for now.

Other states in crisis are

  • Connecticut, where the Democrat governor has signed an executive order to take control of State spending (and do service cuts) after the Democrat legislature couldn’t pass a budget.
  • Maine, where the Republican governor is threatening a government shutdown (and state of emergency) rather than accept another Democrat tax hike.

All of these States face downgrades of their bond ratings.

As to California: it already has some of the nation’s highest tax rates (13% top income, 7-10% sales taxes). With typical “progressive” insanity, CA is spinning on whether to do single-payer health care – a $400B idea that it can’t afford even today, and still less after California’s inevitable pension crisis hits.

Yet another ‘limousine socialist’

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Left-wing NYC Mayor de Blasio has released his tax return. Guess what?

  • “$165,047 in total income” (probably includes his “$52,000 in rental income”)
  • “Mr. de Blasio’s effective tax rate was 8.3%.”
  • “reported $5,597 in gifts to charity, roughly 3%”

So de Blasio got a 6-figure income and gave basically 11% back to the society in which he lives.

I seem to remember lefties screeching with drama and contempt in 2012 when Mitt Romney paid an effective tax rate of 14.1%, plus another whopping 29.7% to charity, for a total give-back to society of 44% of his income, or four times the rate of de Blasio.

Tax Day homily

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Although this story focuses on California’s abuses, it shows how government gets its revenue in general: arbitrarily and with the power and willingness to ruin people’s lives.

In 1970, a young Southern California electrical engineer and inventor named Gilbert Hyatt filed a patent application for an innovative microprocessor chip…

Twenty years later…the U.S. patent office awarded Hyatt the patent…a multimillion-dollar windfall. He moved to Las Vegas, where he said he was a full-time resident before he received the earnings.

California’s Franchise Tax Board (FTB)…decided to seek $7.4 million in back taxes, claiming that he was still a resident of California when the money came in. That sounds like a simple enough dispute that could quickly be resolved, but what followed has been an ordeal that has consumed a good bit of Hyatt’s adult life.

…[for] a sum that now tops $55 million as interest and penalties have accrued…The tax authorities have been pursuing him through its administrative process. Tired of the endless investigations, Hyatt filed suit in Nevada court in 1998. California officials said they weren’t subject to an out-of-state tort lawsuit. California lost that argument in the Nevada Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court and the high court decision sent the case back to a Nevada district court, which awarded Hyatt nearly $400 million in damages after finding that the California authorities abused their power and invaded his privacy. That case is on appeal.

Hyatt believes that California officials are purposefully delaying. “Specifically, because of the 20 year delay Hyatt can no longer obtain a fair and full adjudication of whether he owes state taxes to California,” according to his lawsuit. “During this time, material witnesses have passed away, memories of witnesses have faded, and documents relevant and important to Hyatt are no longer available.” The board keeps assessing penalties…He suspects the tax board is waiting for him to die so that it can go after his estate.

Under California law, the Franchise Tax Board has the “presumption of correctness,” meaning that the onus always is on Hyatt to disprove what the tax officials say. And, he argues, they keep changing their stories and their allegations, thus resulting in more years of legal expenses and disputes…

To sum up – When dealing with the tax man in America today, you have:

  • No “innocent until proven guilty”.
  • No real “right to a speedy trial”.
  • Kafka-esque complexity and situations rigged for you to lose.

To anyone who wants to claim that our tax system is “voluntary”, or that government somehow isn’t a gun, or that taxation somehow isn’t a use of force on people (many conscientious tax-objectors are given long jail sentences): You’re just lying.

Classic Harry Reid on taxes

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Via Zero Hedge. Squirming under the Socratic questioning of interviewer Jan Helfeld, Sen. Reid argues here that because the U.S. tax system is cumbersome (having people self-report, having deductions, often using civil penalties rather than criminal, etc.), it’s somehow “voluntary”; that is, somehow not based on the government taking your money under a threat of force:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6q0slMhDw8&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

This guy pays his taxes right

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He pays in legal tender, the government’s own money. He makes clear what a significant (even ridiculous) amount they’re taking from his home and family. He accurately states that it is not voluntary; the government coerces his payment by threatening to seize his home. He identifies the moral issue: “Our money is our property, and we have a right to it.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRGblJTPRE[/youtube]

Via The Blaze and of course, YouTube.

Are leftist politics, as such, incivil?

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In all the discussions about “civility” the last few years – both in the general public discourse, and on this blog – I’ve often had to wonder what the term means, because it seems to me that leftists routinely propose things which are incivil, in and of themselves. Things of which the mere proposition is a serious threat to, or attack upon, many of their fellow citizens.

As a hypothetical example, let’s take theft. If I come up to you and I propose / threaten, most politely, to steal your livelihood, property and earnings: am I not being incivil, no matter how polite my speech is?

Now suppose I don’t propose to take the risk of thieving from you directly, but instead I propose to have the government seize your earnings on my behalf. The example is no longer hypothetical; it’s what left-liberals propose every day of the year, in every political platform.

I could also talk about speech codes (leftists suppressing speech they don’t like), late-term abortion (leftists claiming the ‘right’ to kill viable human beings), gun control (leftists trying to take self-defense away from people they don’t like), government mandates (leftists endlessly proposing to tell their fellow citizens how to live – backed by government force), etc.

Why do we not recognize, and swiftly dismiss or condemn, their incivility? Is civility more a matter of the forms and rules that people uphold when speaking, or of the inner attitude/intent toward one’s fellow citizen?