Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about the classic comedy, Dr, Strangelove, in which I reveal that I am a humorless dullard, a post about how O. J. Simpson was framed by the Clintons and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.
Today is Tax Day in America, a day when millions of Americans drop tear-soaked checks into the mail, along with their many tax forms. Of course, for most Americans it is now just another day. Their taxes are simple, and their tax is paid by their employer throughout the year. The resulting decline of Tax Day and the tax issue is a good entry point for examining how our politics have changed over the last decade and a good place to start when thinking about the death of conservatism.
Half a century ago, the run-up to Tax Day was a big party for the people we call conservatives, as it gave them an excuse to go out into the streets, banging their pots and pans about the unfairness of the tax code. Taxes were not only too high, but they were also far too complicated. Rarely said, but often implied, was the claim that a complex tax code allowed special interests to game the system and avoid taxes or bribe their favorite politicians to get special tax breaks.
You never hear this sort of talk now. Taxes were the bread-and-butter issue of so-called conservatives since Barry Goldwater, but no more. One reason for that is tax simplification was passed under Trump. For most Americans taxes are a few clicks on the computer and that is it. Business owners, rich people and the self-employed still have to go through the game of guessing what the IRS says they owe, but the typical suburban peasant is now free of this burden.
Interestingly, a central theme of so-called conservatives in the 1970’s and 1980’s regarding taxes was that if people knew how much they really paid in taxes they would revolt against the welfare state. There were schemes back then to make taxes a quarterly affair, so everyone was always be aware of their tax burden. Instead, they went the other way and made taxes simpler, so that their voters no longer cared about the main issue for the so-called conservatives.
Of course, the main reason so-called conservatives have forgotten about the tax issue is they have done with it what they have done with so many other issues and that is embraced the position of the people they oppose. The fiscal conservative is like a guy wearing a denim leisure suit in Washington. It is so rare to hear anyone talk about the nation’s finances that when it happens it brings back memories of those halcyon days when the Gipper was shaking his fist at the Soviets.
This raises another truth about so-called conservatism. They were sure that if you starved the system of taxes, it would have to cut spending. Despite history saying otherwise, they were certain of it. Instead, they habituated their minds to ever growing deficits and an incomprehensible national debt. Per capita debt is about five times higher than under Reagan and about four times higher as a percentage of the GDP, so it is safe to say they were all wrong about this one.
There is a demographic aspect to this as well. When the baby boomers were in their prime working years, it was good politics to promise them lower taxes and greater returns from their investments. Now that they are retiring in droves, the tax ploy no longer works, so no one discusses it. Instead, it is good politics to create more money from thin air to pay for the entitlement programs. Like everything else about conservatism, taxes were nothing but a good marketing ploy.
This raises another tax-related issue. Tax collections are at record highs, but the deficit is also at all-time highs. The federal deficit in 2023 was $1.7 trillion. The rosiest of rosy scenarios says that federal budget deficits be $20 trillion over the next decade and federal debt held by the public will reach 116 percent of GDP. Given that these projections always turn out wrong, it is not hard to see why no one in Washington is talking about taxes or the state of the budget.
This is why so-called conservatism is headed to the dustbin of history. It was never really a conservative political movement, but more of a money laundering scheme masquerading as a political movement. The response to progressives promising to rob your neighbor and let you have a piece was so-called conservatives promising to rob the progressive and let you have a piece. Taken together we got a half century of systemic looting of their American economy.
For the last half century, the white middle-class has been the kid getting bullied at school for his lunch money. Progressives, representing the financial elites, threatened to shove the suburban peasant into a locker. So-called conservatives kept upping the lunch money they had to pay to avoid the wedgie. Now those suburban peasants are too old for school, so those financial elites are looking to prey on their children and grandchildren to keep the plates spinning.
Another legacy of the so-called conservatives with regards to tax policy is the sacralization of rich people. Part of their sales pitch for tax changes was the claim that our noble rich people were paying more than their fair share in taxes. This was always nonsense, but it convinced most white people that it is immoral to question the motives and behavior of the rich. One result is a perfidious and destructive ruling class that seems hellbent on pulling the roof down on all of us.
In the end, the disappearance of the tax issue from public debate is a good reminder that we are at the end of a long cycle. That means we are about to start on a new political cycle, so the past framing of things is of no use to us. The old ideas and arguments from the last century, things like tax fairness, need to be sent to the dustbin of history along with the people who championed them. In some future Tax Day, no one will have a reason to think of so-called conservatism.
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It was not so long ago when you would take up a discussion of some important, structural problem that needed to be addressed. It would be with a, “conservative”, be it a Blue Dog or a Republican. The conversation having a chance to get somewhere substantial was very quickly railroaded with, “Yeah. But America is still by far the best place to be. Things are still great here, so we’ll be okay.”
Twenty years later, Shapiro and Fink are on a coordinated tour to explicitly pull away social security, The Fed is taking it away stealthily with compounding inflation, and Fink and His Boys are making a play to manage your money from cradle to grave.
It is like the GWOT. Twenty years ago there was a patriotic America, (a fairly robust white majority), for Team America to lampoon and parody with spite. Now, a Palestinian guy sets up a tabletop ala Stephen Crowder in Minnesota and invites Imams to lecture how evil America is and then has his 6 year old lead a chant of “Death To America.”
It kind of makes you think things about how Bush II and his team should go out.
This is an interesting article related to taxes, welfare and the future of Americans.
https://www.amren.com/news/2019/10/race-welfare-and-media-lies/
4
“Rarely said, but often implied, was the claim that a complex tax code allowed special interests to game the system and avoid taxes or bribe their favorite politicians to get special tax breaks.”
Yes, of course. But this also applies to any complex legislation — one example being the 2,000 pages of Obamacare.
Other than the tax paid to the federal and state governments, there’s another more insidious form of tax — the “stealth tax” of inflation. One hears little about this except from the likes of Peter Schiff. This stealth tax has been made possible because of the de-linking of the dollar from gold, and the consequent ability of the federal government to create new dollars at will. There’s some sleight-of-hand involved but the creation of dollars ex nihilo is what occurs and these dollars compete with the dollars in our pockets for a limited amount of goods, thus driving up prices and impoverishing us yet further. What will probably put paid to this dishonest system is the increasing reluctance of foreigners to buy dollar-denominated bonds and general “de-dollarisation”; it’s this foreign purchase of dollar-denominated paper that has kept this stealth tax of inflation under control for the last few decades. Without it, the inflation will increase from a trot to a canter to a gallop.
8
Foreign central bank bond purchases effectively allow us to export inflation. It’s pretty incredible. But it can’t go on forever so it won’t.
5
Yes, absolutely — for decades the US has been exporting some of its inflation. As that game is now ceasing, the US will have to keep all of its inflation and the consequences will be dire for most denizens of the country.
2
Even for small business owners, tax software has managed to keep up with the complications of the tax system. to the extent that many self-employed people with decent record keeping can finish their taxes in a few hours, while milking deductions for all they’re worth.
When I was younger, my old man would pore over tax docs for days, all the while mumbling dark thoughts about what should happen to the parasites in Washington. It’s a very different mindset when you’re forced into multiple days of drudgery. Never underestimate how much people will put up with as long as things remain easy and convenient .
17
90 minutes was all it took for me but I have a home office and no payroll. I don’t think a pair of human eyes ever looks at your return until you claim more than $10K in business expenses.
BTW, the Qualified Business Income Deduction seemed pretty huge this year. I expect that will get humped pretty heavily by the “Biden” campaign.
Ironically the Republicans under GWB took a lot of sting out of taxes by removing a number of people (who mostly vote Democrat) from any tax liability at all.
4
When I was younger, my old man would pore over tax docs for days, all the while mumbling dark thoughts about what should happen to the parasites in Washington. It’s a very different mindset when you’re forced into multiple days of drudgery.
This was a sitcom trope for years – the parents going crazy trying to figure out their taxes. Much like “get off the phone, I’m expecting a call”, gone now, to the mists of time.
4
Having finally given up and have a service (accountant) do the taxes I concur—but really, for me as a “wage slave” it should never have been so hard. What took time is all the complication wrt exemptions and deductions. A flat tax would seem to go a long way towards 1) simplification, and 2) bringing to the forefront exactly how onerous one’s “fair share” is—assumes all workers pay such no matter how meager their station in life.
2
Chet: My husband still does this – refuses to do taxes online. And even though we can’t itemize deductions, he still parses everything and always finds something unclear that leaves him intensely frustrated. And now that we’ve left Texas, we unfortunately have state income taxes for the first time – and that just further complicated matters.
4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law
So this clever analyst noticed that no matter the tax regime, the current US postwar “system” can really only collect between 19-20% of GDP in taxes. This has been the most steady, reliable economic “rule” in recent history.
Now, you can always argue that the “system” could be changed and that the burden could be distributed more fairly blah blah. But it would appear that we’ve reached what the economists call a “saddlepoint”. To move from this taxation regime would require a lot of economic/systemic and possibly social dislocation.
No less a figure than Dick Cheney, the perfect bogeyman fake conservative, said that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”. If there is any unifying mantra for the Uniparty, this is it. The opposing mantra, offered by my old economics professor Herb Stein, is “if something can’t go on forever, it will stop”.
We’re about to witness this dialectic playing out in the economy and the financial markets. Our first effort failed, Nixon closed the silver conversion window and we got 10 years of stagflation. In response, the Regime led the financialization of the economy and the dollarization of the world. This system has survived multiple crises intact. Grab the popcorn because we’re now going to test the outer limits.
9
The fact the Federal Reserve can’t get a handle on inflation, along with the amount we pay now in interest on our debt, is creating an atmosphere that could well make the 2008 crisis look tame. A couple more geopolitical disasters and this could easily get out of control right in time for the election.
6
Au contaire, herr Doktor Stein. If something can’t go on forever, it will.
1
Tax spending … No one man has a firm grasp of where all the money is going. The impossible complexity of all those rivers of money means that the spending just perpetuates itself. Perhaps a sensible system would be one in which a single man could look over all the rivers and see a landscape that made sense.
3
When the government collections something between 17%-20% of GDP in taxes every year since World War II, like clockwork, no matter what the rates are on paper or how the code is structured, but the government spends 22%-27% of GDP every year, then the problem isn’t that the taxes are too high or the code is too complicated. The conservatives knew that, they’re not stupid. “Starve the beast” makes no sense if the beast can conjure food out of thin air.
8
A little-known secret is that if you are in your sixties there’s little reason to file a tax return anymore. The IRS backlog for pursing tax compliance issues is about ten years. By the time the IRS gets to your case you will likely be dead or on death’s doorstep, at which time you can structure a settlement with the IRS for 30% to 50% of the taxes you owed. The IRS ceases enforcement of unpaid balances after 10 years, so if you drag it out longer the amounts due from the bottom of the ladder drop off the bottom rung after ten years.
Get your passport renewed before you stop paying, and renew it every few years, because at some point you will be flagged by the IRS and the State Department will not renew your passport. This is an incredibly easy way to throw sand in the gears of the system.
4
1
You won’t mind if I don’t follow your advice here?
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Just remember that the government (A) hates you and wants you dead, (B) is hiring lots of new IRS agents, with all the federal DEI provisions, and (C) is giving them weapons.
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Guest: The assumption is that most people in their 60s are retired (my husband’s friends who worked for the federal or state governments are retired; most who stayed in the private sector/self employed are still working). The entire tax structure is designed to support older retirees and those getting government bennies (ss, medicare, pensions, disability, etc.). I see endless YT comments from people 50+ who are all retired and are recipients of multiple programs.
We take none of the above, and the amount we pay in taxes is staggering. We’ve been using my husband’s 401k to supplement income for family needs and anti-fragility goals (paid off land, house, vehicles, debts, helping our sons, etc.) and it’s biting us hard. The assumption is you won’t need or take it until you are retired and in a low tax bracket, but we aren’t – so it’s significantly impacted our tax bracket for the past two years. Even being old enough not to have to pay the early penalty, the cut the feds get is sickening.
3
What position do you hold with the FBI, sir?
7
Until they tie you to a conservative online comment here or there, and come after you like it’s January 6.
2
Tax collection is a civil process, not a criminal process. The IRS doesn’t do anything until they get a judgment against a taxpayer. The IRS typically doesn’t initiate the process for at least ten years, because their backlog is so deep. Once initiated, the process to obtain a judgment can take 2-3 years and costs the IRS tens of thousands of dollars to obtain, which is why they routinely settle for 30% of the amount due.
If you are a typical middle-class or even upper middle class that does routine W-2 withholding (or pays quarterly taxes) the odds that the IRS will initiate a collection action against you within ten years are near-zero. You will get some nastygrams from the IRS, but that’s about it. I’ve guided dozens of people who wound up in tax trouble through this process.
I’ve been around here basically since the beginning. The deterioration in the comment section over the past five years is painful to watch, and the responses to my comments are exemplary. If you don’t have anything useful to say, why do you feel compelled to say anything?
Funny that doing your taxes gets easier and easier but counting votes gets more and more complicated.
23
“Conservatives” are relegated to the dustbin of history not simply for their embrace of taxes and multi-trillion dollar deficits. They have completely embraced the Police State and abandoned the Bill of Rights.
Just last week the scumbag Mike Johnson broke a tie vote in the House that would have required a warrant for the government to use FISA data against Americans. You would think that the Constitution and the Bill of fucking Rights (LOL, you don’t have any) would automatically supersede pedestrian Congressional legislation, and that Congress requiring a warrant would be redundant, but you would be wrong.
When the time came for the “conservative” Speaker to vote to affirm the Fourth Amendment, he cucked, just like he cucked on the trillion+ spending bill that gave more money to Ukraine and Israel than to border enforcement.
Piece of shit.
22
Xman: Yes, they are all pieces of shit. I’m just surprised that anyone honestly expects anything different from them, ever. Once again – they wouldn’t be in Congress if they weren’t already dirty. They wouldn’t have been a candidate if they didn’t already have the backing of the money men, and thus the local party apparatus. They wouldn’t have considered running if they weren’t already massive egotists who loved to hear themselves talk.
Yet people still support politics and somehow think their local politicians are exempt from these truths. None of them give a damn about ‘the people’ and none of them are going to save anyone but themselves. Stop voting. Stop following the debates. Look to your own family and future, because no one else will.
12
“ Stop following the debates. Look to your own family and future, because no one else will.”
Exactly. That one is so knowledgeable of the political scene is sort of a “tell” that they’ve not come to a complete realization of the futility of it all and the subtle games they are lured into playing.
I am no less guilty here.
5
Johnson claimed to have a “black son” although adoption records for such did not exist. The “black son” now lives in California and has, shockingly, a long rap sheet.
Draw your own conclusions.
8
Johnson looks like someone who goes out of his way to look and act normal but is a secret pervert of some kind. He looks like someone wearing a normal-guy skinsuit.
1
“Piece of shit”
also you need to keep the blackmailing aspect in mind.
1
> When the baby boomers were in their prime working years, it was good politics to promise them lower taxes and greater returns from their investments. Now that they are retiring in droves, the tax ploy no longer works, so no one discusses it. Instead, it is good politics to create more money from thin air to pay for the entitlement programs.
Isn’t that the way Our Democracy is supposed to work? Otherwise, it dies in darkness. Or something.
6
“Tax collections are at record highs, but the deficit is also at all-time highs. The federal deficit in 2023 was $1.7 trillion.”
That’s no coincidence. The federal deficit juices the economy which juices asset prices. Change in federal tax receipts has increasingly become correlated with asset prices.
We’re now in trap.
Even if our politicians found religion and tried to cut spending and raise taxes to get back onto a sustainable path, such as action would likely slow the economy causing asset prices to fall. Even without a recession, tax receipts would fall, blowing out the deficit, making debt to GDP even worse.
More likely, such austerity would cause a recession, lowering asset prices AND requiring more unemployment spending and lower corporate taxes, the combo of which would really blow out the deficit.
So, to fix deficit problem in any meaningful way would require two things – each of which is nearly impossible on its own and astronomically impossible together:
1. Congress decides to work together to address the problem of long-term deficits.
2. Congress comes up with a plan where the resulting slump tax revenue from falling asset prices doesn’t offset the spending cuts/tax increases.
The only hope would be a very long-term, credible plan to slowly (very slowly) cut spending and raise taxes to right the ship over the next decade. Even that plan would see debt to GDP continue to increase but it would slow and eventually level out over the next decade.
There is zero (less than zero) chance that this could happen.
Instead, they’ll keep spending and hope that the bond market plays along, which, eventually, it won’t, which will lead to a quiet form of yield curve control. What happens then is anyone’s guess. Could be Japan. Could be Argentina.
6
Milton Friedman once said that governments will always spend everything they take in taxes, and whatever else they can get away with. His solution was to starve the beast, but as Zman points out, that doesn’t work either.
2
There is an old axiom about hard money that applies here. If your government is so corrupt you need a god standard to control them, your government is corrupt enough to find a way around the gold standard. This applies to everything. We have a corrupt, alien ruling elite that generally hates us. The results follow.
7
I find a similar phenomenon when I read economists discussing debt to GDP. They note that countries almost always get into trouble when debt to GDP gets above 90-100% and definitely get in trouble when it hits 120-130% debt to GDP.
The only exception is Japan for somewhat unique reasons.
Regardless, these economists only look at the situation from one angle. They note how difficult the math becomes once your debt to GDP gets above 100%.
But they never turn the problem on its head and say, “Maybe the main problem isn’t the high debt to GDP but the politicians and system that allowed the country to get to such debt levels in the first place.”
I tend to see the high debt to GDP levels as a symptom of a disease, not the disease itself.
2
We have been somewhat different given our ability to export our inflation. But that has given our politicians enough rope to hang us all, as other major countries are now creating a work around.
I wish the gubmint DID operate according to a god standard. A Christian theocracy sounds pretty good about now.
Apparently, Friedman never heard of debt.
Btw, as much as people rightly trash on the Modern Monetary Theory, I suspect that it’s very useful in helping to understand how the system works. Now, it’s completely worthless in terms of prescribing solutions but it does help describing the situation.
I feel like Z once said the same things about Marx’s work at the time that he wrote about the economy, but not sure.
1
When the deadbeat debtor can no longer borrow, it prints. Inflation drives prices higher. Demand slows and paper currency reverts to its true zero value. Mises called it the “crack up boom.” The process can be slowed by gains in productivity, conquest and plunder.
Eventually the well run dry and the kids will be eating bugs. But when? How have we lasted so long?
4
“Now those suburban peasants are too old for school, so those financial elites are looking to prey on their children and grandchildren to keep the plates spinning.”
An estimated thirty to sixty trillion dollars–which is still a lot of money!–is scheduled to be transferred from the Boomers/Early X’ers to their children and grandchildren over the next ten to twenty years*. That’s some awfully low-hanging fruit and has been noticed. The millions of invaders and future voters mostly do not work and depend on government welfare programs to a larger extent than even what were once quaintly known as “citizens.”
The same prey is just older and weaker now and there are far more predators about. Darwin says “hi!”
*In the incredibly unlikely event the entity unironically known as “The United States” lingers that long.
12
TomA nodded his head and smirked upon reading the bit about keeping the plates spinning…
3
It’s already true, Jack. The powers that be are trying to create workarounds (other than trust funds) for themselves, but for us working-class schlubs, they have already rewritten the minimum distribution rules for children inheriting money their parents saved pre-tax. Specifically, they must take it all out within 10 years of death of the parent, which will be in their high-tax years, instead of letting it be based on their own retirement age.
Net result is that all that cash they put aside for their progeny is already being looted. And to the cheers and raucous applause of the Boomer Haters, who somehow have not realized it’s not the Boomers that are being screwed, but the Haters themselves.
If you were counting on inheriting from your Boomer and Xer parents, the IRS just gave you a big F-You.
Interesting post, Z Man.
I remember an episode of The Simpsons, that was probably released in the mid-90s, where Homer scrambles to compleat his tax returns. Of course, Flanders has it all done well in advance! The funny thing was that Homer worked for the Nuclear powerplant, and I recall wondering why he had to do this. Of course, I was young and dumb.
I also recall my father, a self-employed man who ran his own business, spending hours throughout the week sorting out taxes and staff payments. He was under no illusion how much he paid, which is one reason why I believe small business owners are (or were) a key cornerstone of many freedoms we enjoy (or enjoyed).
In any case, the PAYE (Pay As You Earn) system is what we have in England for most people; and, by the Good God does it hide what you really pay. I’ve always made a point of calculating my own tax (which, invariably, is never quite correct!) just out of interest – and the results of the theft are staggering.
It was well acknowledged by many tax lawyers and accountants that such a mechanism as PAYE, where your employer takes care of it all for you, would result in a general numbing of Joe Normal as to how much cash is stolen from him. Perhaps that has happened. Just one more step in the ‘dumbing down’ of our societies.
I note further that most people even struggle with the basic idea of compounded interest as well as percentages of proportions of a wage – but, according to some, we’re getting smarter! I’ll let you decide the next time you buy groceries and the checkout girl cannot even give you correct change without her till helping her.
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OrangeFrog: Employer federal tax withholding was yet another ‘gift’ of that bastard FDR in 1943. So most people over 35 just automatically know to subtract ‘x’ amount from whatever their supposed salary and income is. Most younger people incessantly bitch about it but still support all sorts of equally socialistic financial lunacy like UBI. The portion of my husband’s annual salary that is withheld for taxes, social security, and medicare (which we will never see) is simply staggering. If we had even 50% of it back – without any interest – we’d be very comfortably retired.
7
Speaking of FDR, has anyone else noticed we have a brand new WW2 movie coming out to try and keep that mythology alive among the younger generations
1
I haven’t noticed any difference in tax protocols post-Trump other than we’re paying more of them.
1
He actually did some good things. He doubled the standard deduction, and limited the deduction for state and local taxes to $10K. This resulted in many more people that don’t need to itemize, and people with high property taxes in NY and CA lose much of their deduction. Basically a wet dream for the George Will/Jonah Goldberg type grifters, who had to pull of their conservative masks and show their hideous faces.
4
“…limited the deduction for state and local taxes to $10K…”
Man I hated that. I know that the income limits on that mean it doesn’t affect the vast majority of taxpayers, but conceptually it is exactly the opposite of what people who want to limit the federal government should want.
We should want the bulk of our taxes to go local, and then state. Not go to the federal government to be handed out to states and localities as rewards and punishments. It should be the federal government that gets the short end of the stick when the full tax bill is tallied up. That change created exactly the opposite incentives.
3
I 100% agree. But it was fun to watch the NY/CA politicians squeal for their rich puppet masters, pulling the mask off their “champions of the poor” bullshit. If Trump did nothing else, as a first-mover he pulled down the curtain on a lot of the fakery.
1
The three gibs that are on track to blow up the fiscal budget are:
Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
I’m in my 50’s have paid into them the maximum amounts for decades…
and don’t expect to see one single cent. Ever. It’ll be bankrupt, but it will start with “means testing.”
Anyone else in their 50s think the same? Infinite money for free indoctrination/college, wars, Zionism, nothing for you.
13
ProZNoV: Same, except we are in our 60s. Paid in for decades. Husband’s still working. Don’t ever expect to see a penny in bennies. Husband’s friends who stuck with fed employment (plus their wives all worked and the kids were parked in daycare and public schools) are all retired enjoying SS, medicare, thrift savings, investments, etc. We cannot relate.
5
honest question , how did their kids turn out? do they have any prospects for grand children?
2
Of the three, it is going to be Medicare that blows it up. Social Security is a badly designed system, but it is predictable. Medicare brings with it the combination of a huge cohort of people entering the age when medical needs increase AND the cost of those needs going up rapidly. The cost of relatively new/novel treatments are insane and they want them all (which on some level is understandable). I can’t see how this will ever add up in an actuarially sound way, in that a person’s Medicare expenses are less than or equal to what they paid for the coverage over the course of their life. Of course, it doesn’t, and nobody expects it to. Every single person on Medicare will be taking far more from the program than they put in.
I think right now, entitlements + debt spending is equal to 100% of tax receipts, which means that the entire military and everything else is on the country’s credit card. It’s only going to get worse.
2
Social Security and Medicare will still be around, but SS will be worth less and you might get means tested out of some of that. But you’ll still get a decent portion of what you’ve been promised.
Medicare – which is the big problem – will be more interesting. It’ll still be around but at what quality and what price. I’d suspect the cost of Medicare will increase and the quality of doctors accepting it will fall, which means that you’ll have to get very good (very expensive) Medigap or something like that to go with Medicare.
2
The medical.establishment, is going to be more politicisized? including future doctors now coming out of medical schools? Say it ain’t so.
At some point, the eligibility age for medicare has to rise. No way around it. Probably as the result of some late night congressional vote with no public discussion prior. And then again, as needed.
1
As noted before, SSI has a recurring source of funding and failure clause in the law. They must reduce pay out to revenue, equally, across the board. The effect here will of course affect grandma and grandpa, but not the general revenue—unless Congress fills in the gap with more deficit spending.
Spending on Medicare/Medicaid is of course much, much worse, basically unfunded, and is the big unknown. However, such seems to be a problem elsewhere in more “enlightened” nations like GB, where the NHS is suffering under the pressure of the elderly and immigrant refugees. The monies allocated yearly for that nation’s “free” healthcare seems never enough.
My prediction is we will see rationing of healthcare. The poor will suffer as the must, the rich will do as the like.
5
The biggest tax I pay is my ever increasing medical “insurance,” about half of which is subsidy to people who receive “free” medical care
5
You are correct, but not in the way you state it. You will certainly receive your $2500 or so a month in Social Security, but everything you buy will cost $3000 more. And you will have full health insurance, unless you actually need it to cover something. The government will have control over you, but your net benefits will be negative. Thank you public servants! Please take an extra round of bribes and make a few more insider trades.
7
Proz-
Mid-40s and I feel the same.
I wouldn’t mind having all that money refunded to go buy precious metals and some land.
During the 2000s I put lots of energy into opposing illegal immigration. There were a number of free market conservatives who defended open borders, whom I really came to hate.
The one whom I hated most was Stephen Moore, who served with Club for Growth, WSJ, and Heritage Foundation. He would say all the unbearable things like immigrants deserved America more than the lazy white working class. When Hannity would have him on, my teeth would grind fearsomely.
Today, he writes for Taki, which is bizarre. The title of his most recent article? “Biggest Corporate Welfare Scam of All Time.”
What disgusts me about this man is that he still believes that if we could just embrace laisse faire economics then everything would be right in America again. He represents the treason of the elites against the traditional American people.
When I’m grouchy, I think of some of the people that I would like to meet alone in a dark alley. Stephen Moore crosses my mind.
2
The U.S. government borrows $80k a second.
https://www.usdebtclock.org/
There is no taxing our way out of it. The taxes I pay are just the penalty for being middle class and not completely beholden to the government for all my needs.
5
I have said a number of times that government spending no longer has any functional connection to tax revenue. They create debt currency in amounts that exceed the GDPs of most countries on Earth. There is never any thought at all given to “Can we afford X?” Thus, taxes exist solely as a means of reward and punishment.
10
There’s also a little chestnut out there about many or most American believing they too will become rich. It’s some sort of spell placed upon the masses that “your big break is just around the corner.” This helped drum up support of the rich by the poor.
I don’t recall the numbers, but this is likely a contributor to the overall sentiment of the Fox News viewership.
3
rush Limbaugh pushed this hard too.
3
Also noting that right now we have double-digit inflation (and will until spending is under control), and progressive tax rates that are not indexed for inflation. So, unless their is a big adjustment to the brackets, people whose pay is almost keeping up with inflation will soon find themselves in higher brackets paying the “tax the rich” rates on very middle-class incomes.
6
I don’t now what taxes our kids will pay but if the current madness keeps up our grandkids will be paying in flints and rabbit loins
8
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, the US Federal Government has spent about $10 trillion fighting foreign mini-wars against goat herders and built overly complex and expensive military equipment that cannot be operated by the low IQ POC that dominates the current crop of recruits. In contrast, China built a highly robotic automobile assembly plant that churns out a finished auto every 17 seconds. How did this happen?
Answer. The President of the United States shits his pants. That statement is not hyperbole. It is a fact.
And tens of millions of Americans will vote for him to keep shitting his pants for four more years. This cannot be fixed without a collapse.
8
3
Yup.
In my workplace the bugmen are utterly tumescent over the beginning of the Trump hush money trial in NY’s kangaroo court.
I’ve been reading up on it, a little bit, and I still don’t understand what he’s been charged with or why it’s ostensibly a crime.
The effective tax rate should be 16.35685324575437%. I am as adamant about this as I am that Jesus is the risen Son of God.
3
The automated/simplified system at IRS is both convenient and deadly.
My experience – I wrote the quarterly payment amount in the wrong row of the 1040 (one below where it should be). The final tax calculation and everything were correct.
Within a month, IRS software recalculated my 1040 and decided that I should get $30K tax refund instead of $5 or so that I expected. I got a huge check back in mail. At the same time, I got an angry letter that I did not pay $30K taxes (plus interest/fine) and needed to pay it pronto.
Sorting these out through IRS’s phone system was nightmare, because hardly any person understood the problem and even worse understood the solution around the automated software system. I sent back the $30K, submitted a revised return and again got $30K tax refund and another angry letter !!
Finally after 6 months of back and forth, a lady at IRS with Asian accent figured out the simple math of it to help me out. I suspect this lady will get replaced by “enhanced” AI in the next iteration.
8
Here’s my little tax horror story. Way back in 1987 I was a college student making ends meet–sort of–by delivering pizzas. Well, I was completely ignorant about tax machinations at the time, and when I did my 1040EZ for 1987, I neglected to report my tips!
That steamed up the suits and cigars over at the IRS but good and they came after my ass with all guns blazing. They audited me and slapped me with a fine massive enough that it knocked me out of college for four years.
So, if anybody ever tells you that the IRS isn’t interesting in your piddling income tax or that you can somehow slip through the cracks, give ’em a poke in the chops for ol’ Kozelskii.
2
I once went a dozen or so years without filing an income tax return. And then one year I started filing again. Nothing happened. This was about 14 years ago, I’ve been filing ever since, and still nothing has happened.
It should be noted that during all but one of the dozen or so years I didn’t file, I was just costing myself money in sacrificed refunds. I was not making enough, or owning enough, to be costing the feds anything.
Forgive me for going off topic but we’ve got to laugh when we can. And each tax day becomes all the more infuriating the more we discover about this failing GAE.
From a pretty funny comedian out of Canada:
“We’ve been trained to not have a sense of humor as we give up the country to migrants. We see migrants all over the place now. I saw a 40 year old migrant African dude during the snow storm. It was obvious he was a recent migrant, because he was walking around trying to catch snowflakes on his tongue. All I could think was that guy better not be my Uber driver because he’s going to be shocked at the road conditions.”
2
In what should be a great irony, tax day is when conservatives gather to praise “the rich” (let’s accept Z’s shorthand here) by treating the rules of taxation as holy.
It’s not only legal but unimpeachably ethical and rational that people who sell stocks pay far less tax than people who sell wrenches, because *that* income isn’t income.
It’s a beauty of creation, on par with a sunrise, that broke guys with the worst jobs lose a ruinous percentage of their pay to the government, because that’s not taxes, it’s prepaid retirement—which statistically they’ll die before they get “back.”
It’s a moral horror that nearly half of income taxes are paid by “the 1%” who receive far more than half the income and own almost everything.
Etc.
For some real fun on this holy day, remind a conservative commentator—all the ones on the internet are some kind of bureaucrat—of the indisputable mathematical fact that government employees don’t pay any taxes whatsoever, they just ritually mock the act.
3
The willing, nay eager, embrace of the leisure suit was a milestone in the self-enslavement of the American populace.
3
You can say whatever you want about libertarianism, or conservatism, and it’s probably true, but the fact remains, I have never once in my life seen a tax cut, no matter whose taxes were being cut or by how much or how little, that I didn’t like. Not one time.
But that’s largely just a shell game. At the federal/empire level, the taxes exist mainly to support the value of their fiat currency.
Because the real tax that the regime has agreed to levy is the inflation tax. Which we have been paying for a long, long time. Longer than anyone has been alive. Over most of its history, it was barely perceptible, hardly noticed. The scumbags even managed to normalize the idea that 2% annual inflation is healthy and good. But that was their inflation tax, slow, steady, inexorable. Lately it’s larger, so more people are talking about it, but it’s not a new thing.
Perhaps inflation is really sort of a societal greed index. A non greedy people wouldn’t need to inflate to pay for things they couldn’t afford but felt entitled to.
7
Maybe I’m crazy, but I think the feds should stick to their core mission and fund themselves by taxing commerce, i.e., tariffs, sales tax, road tax, securities, etc. It’ll never happen, because people might consume less and save more.
Iirc SCOTUS once said taxing labor is tantamount to slavery, and I agree. I think the same way about property tax, but I guess that’s more of a state issue. Earn a living, put a roof over your head— bad! Trade and raid— good!
2