Thursday, April 14, 2005

The Fed Holds a Gun to Two Dogs Head!

Just got through with the tax thing. I feel violated. Twenty-seven percent. Man, what a load of crap.

Continually saying "I just paid an Army Captain's salary" keeps me from completely coming unglued. If only I could dictate where that money goes, I would feel better. I know that government is not free, but if the top three percent of wage earners pay ninety percent of all taxes, why am I in the same group as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Te-rayza Heinz? I'm guessing they pay their pool boy more than I make. Well T. Heinz probably owns hers....

I think that I'm going out and break up some of the Interstate highway and bring it home to make a rip-rap wall around my koi pond. I will feel better.

Damn.

UPDATE: I just paid an Army Captain's salary. Hey, go kill some terrorists! Need more ammunition? I'll catch that next year when my salary is exponentially higher. Don't worry, I got it. Damn, I wish I could do that. Our military would get a check with a smiley face on it from me.

UPDATE 2: Double damn.

UPDATE 3: Hey all the Google ads are about reparations! Click them bad boys so I can pay the tax man. BIG TRIPLE DAMN DAMN.

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21 comments:

Anonymous said...

Points that I whole heartedly agree with. I have a post in the works on my proposals for reforming the tax code. Stay tuned for that.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting on our college life here in Nebraska. It's nice to know someone cares.... ?

Keep up the great work on your site, I'm with you on making a bigger paycheck to our military men and women.

Regards,

Travis

Paul Mitchell said...

Thanks for playing Travis, and keep up the good work. I'll pay for some more milk if y'all will keep trying.

Tom said...

Remember that the top 1%, starts at only $373,000. That means most small business owners are in the top 1% of our economy.

The starting point of the top 20 percent starts at only $117,500. This means married couples who each earn more than $60,000 net a year, are within the top 20 percent of the wealthiest people in America.

These segments alone pay almost all the taxes. Remember that the abstraction "top 20 percent!" is concretized by married couples, small business owners, and people you wouldn't normally think of as rich. And yet they are the ones who produce.
Check out these essays:

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/articles/03/povamerica.html

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/articles/02/taxation.html

Paul Mitchell said...

Yea, my business partner just cut a check for forty-eight grand today. He actually got a kick out of it, but it pissed me off no end. Damn, will y'all go ahead and get out of damn college so y'all can straighten this shit out?

Paul Mitchell said...

Oh, hell, I just read your links Tom. If you are a college student reading Dr. Williams, you are going to be fine, just fine. And move to Mississippi, we need young talent down here.

Tom said...

I respect Walter Williams like a father.

I grew up on Bastiat, Rothbard, Mises, Rand, Hazlitt, Sowell, Williams, and Twain. I follow a rule: don't fill your head with stupid shit that you'll one day have to figure out is bullshit. It's a waste of time, and is much harder than learning the correct stuff first. Most people take 10 years after they graduate from college to figure out that almost all the economics and philosophy they learned are crap and have their logical expression in Auschwitz. Just don't learn the crap in the first place, and you're automatically 10 years ahead of the curve.

The problem I face, is that I must also learn to refute the spurious arguments of the Keynesians and socialists, as J.S. Mill said: "The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary's case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. This is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of, else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition, even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess. They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred. All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavored to see the reasons of both in the strongest light. So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up."

Hence my studying spurious economics in a regular college at Canisius, rather than jumping ship and heading off toward the Mises Institute.

Paul Mitchell said...

So, in order to understand the ill-informed better, you go to a school that teaches the stuff you know to be false? Forgive me, I thought that everyone knew Keynes stuff was crap. Well, if there is someone that can pull that off, it might as well be you.

You present a very cogent argument for your learning curve theories. It's impressive. I am guilty of basically just writing off a twenty-somethings' opinion. That old argument about if you aren't a liberal in your twenties, you have no heart. And if you aren't a conservative by the time you're thirty, you have no brain.

I read Dr. Sowell's articles regularly and I do believe that he could be the smartest man alive.

Tom said...

Even worse.

My professors themselves acknowledge that they are teaching lies, which are refuted if at all later on. Which means, unless a student is actually going to take grad courses, and unless he really lucks out, he will never know that there is no such thing a consumption function, expenditure multiplier, Aggregate Demand curve, or "util."

Read this, on the problems of teaching/learning economics when you are an Austrian: http://www.mises.org/story/1720

The Bobo Knitter said...

Two Dogs, don't you just love that Tom? I do. I want to take him home and squeeze him he's so smart.

On the tax front, I wrote out a check for 4 grand yesterday and then went and threw up!

Paul Mitchell said...

Well. that is what you get for being wealthy. Yep, welcome to pulling the damn wagon. This mules getting tired.

And with Tom, he seems so unlike me when I was young. I was just thinking about the girls and drinking.

The Bobo Knitter said...

Wealthy my foot! Now I am even more not wealthy than I was yesterday.

Paul Mitchell said...

I so know what you mean. To leftists, if you are not living in poverty, you are wealthy.

Erik Grow said...

Hmmm, so in your perfect world, where would the money come from? Where would you shift the taxes? Let me guess. National sales tax?

Paul Mitchell said...

I am just saying that if withholding tax is done away with, the rate doesn't have to change. The incrementalism of payroll taxes let's the less intelligent of us to be completely disinterested with income tax. "Hell, I didn't pay, I'm getting some back." That makes me want to punch my best friend in the adam's apple when he says it.

While a consumption tax would be great, it will never happen. Congress (Dems & Reps) loves the money too much to actually allow something to reduce the amount I get raped every year. And Oddybobo, too. So far, we are the only ones in our discussion group that have taken to bitchin'.

I would gladly continue to get screwed if they would let me write a check to the particular expenditure that I agreed with. Like I said, the check to our military would have a smiley face on it. More dead terrorists, please.

Tom said...

Milt Friedman was one of the people who advocated a withholding tax.

It makes private enterprise collect taxes (90% of all income tax revenue is collected this way), doing a much better job than any bureaucrat could. And, it shifts the image of the government from an entity which draws in money in order to protect rights, to an entity that gives you a little Christmas in April.

Remember: you never see 9 out of the 10 dollars that are taxed from you. It never even shows up on your paycheck. That lets you forget about them, so you aren't that outraged when you get a little money back which looks relatively larger because you're only looking at a small portion of the taxes you've actually paid.

Paul Mitchell said...

Thanks for playing Pam. Leave the light on for me.

Paul Mitchell said...

Oh, and TOm, some of us are all too aware exactly how much money is siphoned from us by the Fed. Will you guys get outta damn college and fix this crap, please?

Tom said...

Multiply your income tax by ten. That is how much you are actually paying.

Tom said...

That's going in my testimonials too. Ha.

KR said...

One of my best friends was in a horrid mood on Friday. I asked him what was wrong. He said he had to pay $2M in taxes this year.

I told him I wished I had his problems.

Paul Mitchell said...

I can't fathom that. Te-ray-za Kerry didn't pay but 330k on dividend income.