Over Taxation Quotes

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.

No one has the right to place one human being in a position of political power over another.

It’s been easier to convince people to hand over half their income, their children to war, and their freedoms in perpetuity, than to engage them in seriously considering how roads might function in the absence of taxation.

But who would build the roads if there were no government? You mean to tell me that 300 million people in this country and 7 billion people on the planet would just sit around in their houses and think “Gee, I’d like to go visit Fred, but I can't because there isn’t a flat thing outside for me to drive on, and I don’t know how to build it and the other 300 million or 7 billion people can’t possibly do it because there aren’t any politicians and tax collectors. If they were here then we could do it. If they were here to boss us around and steal our money and really inefficiently build the flat places, then we would be set. Then I would be comfortable and confident that I could get places. But I can’t go to Fred’s house or the market because we can’t possibly build a flat space from A to B. We can make these really small devices that enable us to contact people from all over the word that fits in our pockets; we can make machines that we drive around in, but no, we can’t possibly build a flat space.

No middle ground is possible on this subject. Either "taxation without consent is robbery," or it is not. If it is not, then any number of men, who choose, may at any time associate; call themselves a government; assume absolute authority over all weaker than themselves; plunder them at will; and kill them if they resist.

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact--in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself--of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed using taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PC progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates. [...] In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.

In particular, the State has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly over police and military services, the provision of law, judicial decision-making, the mint and the power to create money, unused land ("the public domain"), streets and highways, rivers and coastal waters, and the means of delivering mail...the State relies on control of the levers of propaganda to persuade its subjects to obey or even exalt their rulers.

Liberty is not about class war, income war, race war, national war, a war between the sexes, or any other conflict apart from the core conflict between individuals and those who would seek power and control over the human spirit. Liberty is the dream that we can all work together, in ways of our choosing and of our own human volition, to realize a better life.

It must be remembered that a vast majority of mankind’s history has been spent living under the rule of tyrants and authoritarians. The ideas of Liberty are very new when you consider the big picture. By contrast, various forms of socialism and fascism have been adopted over and over again. Be wary of those who try to present these old and tired ideas as something new and exciting. Liberty and free markets are the way forward if we truly desire peace and prosperity.

All told, over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent.

it is easy to imagine the widespread pleasure when in 167 BCE Rome became a tax-free state: the treasury was so overflowing – thanks, in particular, to the spoils from the recent victory over Macedon – that direct taxation of Roman citizens was suspended except in emergencies, although they remained liable to a range of other levies, such as customs dues or a special tax charged on freeing slaves.

Thirty years ago [written 2009], over-regulation, over-taxation, mis-regulation, statism, state corporatism, and economic folly, cosiness and regulatory capture, and a crescent ideological enemy without, who were assisted by enemies – both fifth columnists and useful fools – within, had led to a crisis of confidence in the West, and in all lands that – and amongst all peoples, particularly those who were oppressed in their own lands, who – loved and desired liberty. Of course, thirty years ago, Britain had Margaret Thatcher to turn to.

Our politicians tell us we are free, even though most governments take over 50% of what we earn. They claim we get services that we need for our hard-earned money, even though we could buy the same services at half the price from the private sector. Today, we ridicule the slave-owners' claim that they "gave back" to their slaves by housing, clothing, feeding them, and bestowing upon them the "benefits" of civilization instead of leaving them in their native state. We see this as a self-serving justification for exploitation. In the future, we will view being forcibly taxed to pay for things we don't want, such as bombs for the Middle East, subsidies for tobacco, other people's abortions, regulations that put small businesses out of business, prisons for people trying to feel good, keeping life-saving medications out of the hands of dying people, etc., as taking away our freedom. When even a small portion of our lives is spent enslaved, that part tends to dominate the rest of our time. If we don't put our servitude first as we structure the remainder of our lives, our masters will make sure we regret it. How much freedom do we need to survive and how much do we need to thrive?

In his history, Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent, Martin notes that the passage of the income tax in 1913 was regarded as calamitous by many wealthy citizens, setting off a century-long tug-of-war in which they fought repeatedly to repeal or roll back progressive forms of taxation. Over the next century, wealthy conservatives developed many sophisticated and appealing ways to wrap their antitax views in public-spirited rationales. As they waged this battle, they rarely mentioned self-interest, but they consistently opposed high taxes that fell most heavily on themselves.

To summarise, the design of Nordic tax systems has over time created a ‘fiscal illusion’, whereby the public is not aware of the taxes they are paying. One can reflect on whether it is really in line with democratic principles to raise taxes in a way such that citizens are unaware of them. Interestingly, few proponents of introducing a Nordic model of high taxes in other countries stress that such a move would require hiding the true cost of taxation from the public.

Just like our forefathers in Boston Harbor, who boarded a British ship to let the king know they would have none of his tyrannical rule, this man boarded the pirate ship called the IRS, and let the repressive government, the unfeeling government that is embodied by the man who inhabits the building over there," Hamilton said, pausing and pointing to the White House, a few blocks away. "This courageous man let that evil government know he would no longer suffer under its indifference. Would no longer tolerate taxation without representation. Would no longer accept the injustice and indignity met out by that government organization." From TAX BREAK, written in 1991, but sounding like today's politics.

Today the message most commentators take from Adam Smith is that government should get out of the way. But that was not Smith’s message. He was enthusiastic about government regulation so long as it wasn’t simply a ruse to advantage one set of commercial interests over another. When “regulation . . . is in favor of the workmen,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “it is always just and equitable.” He was equally enthusiastic about the taxes needed to fund effective governance. “Every tax,” he wrote, “is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty.”9 Contemporary libertarians who invoke Smith before decrying labor laws or comparing taxation to theft seem to have skipped these passages. Far from a tribune of unregulated markets, Smith was a celebrant of effective governance. His biggest concern about the state wasn’t that it would be overbearing but that it would be overly beholden to narrow private interests. His greatest ire was reserved not for public officials but for powerful merchants who combined to rig public policies and repress private wages. These “tribes of monopoly” he compared with an “overgrown standing army” that had “become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.” Too often, Smith maintained, concentrated economic power skewed the crafting of government policy. “Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen,” he complained, “its counsellors are always the masters. . . . They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”10

Some equestrians were involved in the potentially lucrative business of provincial taxation, thanks to another law of Gaius Gracchus. For it was he who first arranged that tax collecting in the new province of Asia should, like many other state responsibilities, be contracted out to private companies, often owned by equestrians. These contractors were known as publicani – ‘public service providers’ or ‘publicans’, as tax collectors are called in old translations of the New Testament, confusingly to modern readers. The system was simple, demanded little manpower on the part of the Roman state and provided a model for the tax arrangements in other provinces over the following decades (and was common in other early tax raising regimes). Periodic auctions of specific taxation rights in individual provinces took place at Rome. The company that bid the highest then collected the taxes, and anything it managed to rake in beyond the bid was its profit. To put it another way, the more the publicani could screw out of the provincials, the bigger their own take – and they were not liable to prosecution under Gaius’ compensation law. Romans had always made money out of their conquests and their empire, but increasingly there were explicitly, and even organised, commercial interests at stake.

Er … what is the current rate of taxation, do you think?” I asked, tactfully drawing attention away from Stanhope’s spluttering. Wylie pursed his lips, considering. A dandy, he wore the latest in modish wigs, and a small patch in the shape of a star beside his mouth. Under the powder, though, I thought I detected both a good-looking face and a very shrewd brain. “Oh, considering all incidentals, I should say it can amount to as much as two per centum of all income, if one was to include the taxes on slaves. Add taxes on lands and crops, and it amounts to a bit more, perhaps.” “Two percent!” Stanhope choked, pounding himself on the chest. “Iniquitous! Simply iniquitous!” With vivid memories of the last IRS form I had signed, I agreed sympathetically that a two percent tax rate was a positive outrage, wondering to myself just what had become of the fiery spirit of American taxpayers over the intervening two hundred years.

Zeno’s legacy, however, provided a secure throne to work from, and over the next three decades the empire experienced a remarkable recovery. Bribery and corruption were rooted out, money was collected more efficiently, and taxes were generally lowered. Commerce, freed from the burdens of excessive taxation, once again flourished, and wealth came pouring into the cities and markets of the empire. A population increase followed the improving economy, and the empire began to prosper on an unprecedented scale.

For instance, the United States now has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world: 39.1 percent (35 percent federal tax plus the average state tax). Even in Sweden, it’s only 22 percent. In France, it’s 34.4 percent—and their leaders are actual, card-carrying socialists! If that’s not enough to scare corporations away from building factories in America, consider all the other disincentives placed on them: the Obamacare mandates; the explosion of government regulations from the EPA, the FTC, and the whole alphabet soup of federal agencies; the fact that if they want to move money they made and had already paid taxes on in other nations back to America, where it could create jobs, we tax it again, eliminating their profits. The private research firm Audit Analytics calculated that between 2008 and 2013, American-owned corporations amassed over $2.1 trillion in profits overseas that were not brought back to the United States to be reinvested because they would be subject to double taxation. Imagine how big a “stimulus” it would be to job creation here at home to inject $2.1 trillion of nonborrowed money directly into private sector investment. Companies used to run to America; now they run from America.

The rate of taxation to supposedly “fund” Social Security has been increasing over time. Currently workers pay 6.2 percent of their first $117,000 of earnings in Social Security taxes and their employers pay an additional 6.2 percent. The self-employed pay the full 12.4 percent themselves.6 When the program started in the 1930s, however, the tax rate was only 1 percent of income on a much lower income threshold and did not reach 3 percent until 1960.7 In fact, the amount of money subject to the Social Security payroll tax has grown significantly over time. From the 1930s until 1950, workers paid tax on the first $3,000 of their income. That cap did not reach $10,000 until the 1970s. Presently, workers pay FICA taxes on the first $117,000 of their income, and that amount will continue to rise with increases in the average wage.

There was one obligation that the Romans imposed on all those who came under their control: namely, to provide troops for the Roman armies. In fact, for most of those who were defeated by Rome and forced, or welcomed, into some form of ‘alliance’, the only long-term obligation seems to have been the provision and upkeep of soldiers. These peoples were not taken over by Rome in any other way; they had no Roman occupying forces or Roman-imposed government. Why this form of control was chosen is impossible to know. But it is unlikely that any particularly sophisticated, strategic calculation was involved. It was an imposition that conveniently demonstrated Roman dominance while requiring few Roman administrative structures or spare manpower to manage. The troops that the allies contributed were raised, equipped and in part commanded by the locals. Taxation in any other form would have been much more labour-intensive for the Romans; direct control of those they had defeated would have been even more so.

Restrictionism, however, demands positive sacrifices from the national exchequer when it is carried out by the withdrawal of notes from circulation (say through the issue of interest-bearing bonds or through taxation) and their cancellation. The unpopularity of restrictionism has other causes as well. Attempts to raise the objective exchange-value of money, in the circumstances that have existed, have necessarily been limited either to single States or to a few States and at the best have had only a very small prospect of simultaneous realization throughout the whole world. Now as soon as a single country or a few countries go over to a money with a rising purchasing power, while the other countries retain a money with a falling or stationary exchange-value, or one which although it may be rising in value is not rising to the same extent, then, as has been demonstrated above, the conditions of international trade are modified. In the country whose money is rising in value, exportation becomes more difficult and importation easier.

Someone brings up “Sandwiches,” and someone else a Bottle, and as night comes down over New-York like a farmer’s Mulch, sprouting seeds of Light, some reflected in the River, the Company, Mason working on in its midst, becomes much exercis’d upon the Topick of Representation. “No taxation— ” “— without it, yesyes but Drogo, lad, can you not see, even thro’ the Republican fogs which ever hang about these parts, that ’tis all a moot issue, as America has long been perfectly and entirely represented in the House of Commons, thro’ the principle of Virtual Representation?” Cries of, “Aagghh!” and, “That again?” “If this be part of Britain here, then so must be Bengal! For we have ta’en both from the French. We purchas’d India many times over with the Night of the Black Hole alone,— as we have purchas’d North America with the lives of our own.” “Are even village Idiots taken in any more by that empty cant?” mutters the tiny Topman McNoise, “no more virtual than virtuous, and no more virtuous than the vilest of that narrow room-ful of shoving, beef-faced Louts, to which you refer,— their honor bought and sold so many times o’er that no one bothers more to keep count.— Suggest you, Sir, even in Play, that this giggling Rout of poxy half-wits, embody us? Embody us? America but some fairy Emanation, without substance, that hath pass’d, by Miracle, into them?— Damme, I think not,— Hell were a better Destiny.

with the exception of England, every other industrialized democracy has higher levels of income equality than the United States. Data from the OECD shows one consistent, general principle: The higher the taxes in a given country, the less inequality. This makes obvious and intuitive sense. Taxation is the primary method for redistribution, and as a general rule, the more taxation, the more redistribution; the more redistribution, the more equality. The United States collects a far smaller share of the national income in taxes than nearly every other industrialized democracy, and in recent years that rate has been dropping. Total tax revenue as percentage of GDP in the United States is at 24.8 percent, down from 29.5 percent in 2000. You can compare that to Denmark, which has the highest level of tax revenue as a percentage of GDP (48.2 percent) and the most equality out of any OECD country.15 Over the last thirty years or so we’ve seen rising inequality in pre-tax income, which means that before the government even starts its taxing, spending, and redistribution, there has been a profound and accelerating gap between high income earners and everyone else. The rich are earning more, while the non-rich’s earnings stagnate or decline. But these pre-tax earnings are run through the redistributive mechanisms of the state. And during the same time that pre-tax inequality has been growing, our tax system has grown less redistributive, further amplifying inequality rather than mitigating it. This

The Zuma system resembled a medieval state in which the king or mafia don was owed fealty by mighty barons who paid him tribute and gave him political and military support if needed. Within their own baronies, the barons were almost absolute rulers, exacting tribute from those beneath them and exercising powers of patronage over lower-level appointments. Normally speaking, the king would not interfere with their administration though he did exercise powers of taxation over the whole populace. Only if a baron or his underlings exacted so much tribute as to cause a peasants’ revolt or create major scandal within the kingdom, would the king be forced to act – though naturally, any sign that a baron was no longer loyal to the king would trigger more severe action. The heart of the system was KwaZulu-Natal. Although the ANC there was just as prone to factional feuding as anywhere else, when it came to the crunch it would be bound to support the first Zulu president not only out of tribal loyalty but because of the rich rewards of patronage the province received as a result of its central position. With KwaZulu-Natal effectively sewn up, together with Free State and Mpumalanga, Zuma was invulnerable. Many commentators failed to understand this and, the wish being father to the thought, frequently speculated that the ANC might grow weary of the incessant cloud of scandal which hung over Zuma and decide to eject him, as it had ejected Mbeki. In fact this was quite impossible while the whole weight of tribal loyalty and

This fragmentation of public authority went even further in Pakistan than in India. In Pakistan, state power never permeated society as deep and far as in India, as the dissemination of highly technological forms of violence within society and the inability of state authorities to enforce a national system of taxation exemplify—two developments that have no parallel in neighbouring India. The evolutions of Karachi’s society over the past four decades bear testimony to this. The proliferation and ever-increasing power of these non-state sovereigns, claiming for themselves the right to discipline and punish but also to protect, tax and represent local populations, has turned the city into a ‘zone of unsettled sovereignties and loyalties’,122 where the access to arms has become the privileged if not the sole venue towards power and wealth.

The key ‘subtle influences’ were enumerated as: the rise of the city over the countryside, the loss of Britons’ maritime skills, the growth of refinement and luxury, the absence of literary taste, the decline of the physical form of Britons, the decay of the country’s religious life, excessive taxation, false systems of education and, finally, the inability of the British to defend their empire.

California and Italy are about the same size. Roughly speaking, California contains about 150,000 square miles, Italy about 120,000 square miles. They are not dissimilar in physical characteristics. They extend over a long distance from north to south, and each has an extensive coastline. Each is destitute of coal mines. Each produces large quantities of wheat. Each produces citrus and other fruits, olives, wine, and raisins. The climate is about the same, although California's is superior. They are in about the same zone. Rome lies in about the same latitude as San Francisco. Our state is one of the richest and most fertile of all the United States. Yet suppose that California were as populous as Italy—someday it will be. Suppose it had a population of millions. Could California, even with its vast resources, support an army of a quarter of a million men as Italy does? She could do it only as Italy does, by grinding the people into the dust with oppressive taxation.

The new GST: A halfway house In spite of all the favourable features of the GST, it introduces the anomaly of having an origin-based tax on interstate trade he proposed GST would be a single levy. 1141 words From a roadblock during the UPA regime, the incessant efforts of the BJP government have finally paved way for the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST). This would, no doubt, be a major reform in the existing indirect tax system of the country. With a view to introducing the GST, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has introduced the Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill 2014 in Parliament. The new tax would be implemented from April 1, 2016. Both the government and the taxpayers will have enough time to understand the implications of the new tax and its administrative nuances. Unlike the 119th Amendment Bill, which lapsed with the dissolution of the previous Lok Sabha, the new Bill will hopefully see the light of the day as it takes into account the objections of the state governments regarding buoyancy of the tax and the autonomy of the states. It proposes setting up of the GST Council, which will be a joint forum of the Centre and the states. This council would function under the chairmanship of the Union finance minister with all the state finance ministers as its members. It will make recommendations to the Union and the states on the taxes, cesses and surcharges levied by the Union, the states and the local bodies, which may be subsumed in the GST; the rates including floor rates with bands of goods and services tax; any special rate or rates for a specified period to raise additional resources during any natural calamity or disaster etc. However, all the recommendations will have to be supported by not less than three-fourth of the weighted votes—the Centre having one-third votes and the states having two-third votes. Thus, no change can be implemented without the consent of both the Centre and the states. The proposed GST would be a single levy. It would aim at creating an integrated national market for goods and services by replacing the plethora of indirect taxes levied by the Centre and the states. While central taxes to be subsumed include central excise duty (CenVAT), additional excise duties, service tax, additional customs duty (CVD) and special additional duty of customs (SAD), the state taxes that fall in this category include VAT/sales tax, entertainment tax, octroi, entry tax, purchase tax and luxury tax. Therefore, all taxes on goods and services, except alcoholic liquor for human consumption, will be brought under the purview of the GST. Irrespective of whether we currently levy GST on these items or not, it is important to bring these items under the Constitution Amendment Bill because the exclusion of these items from the GST does not provide any flexibility to levy GST on these items in the future. Any change in the future would then require another Constitutional Amendment. From a futuristic approach, it is prudent not to confine the scope of the tax under the bindings of the Constitution. The Constitution should demarcate the broad areas of taxing powers as has been the case with sales tax and Union excise duty in the past. Currently, the rationale of exclusion of these commodities from the purview of the GST is solely based on revenue considerations. No other considerations of tax policy or tax administration have gone into excluding petroleum products from the purview of the GST. However, the long-term perspective of a rational tax policy for the GST shows that, at present, these taxes constitute more than half of the retail prices of motor fuel. In a scenario where motor fuel prices are deregulated, the taxation policy would have to be flexible and linked to the global crude oil prices to ensure that prices are held stable and less pressure exerted on the economy during the increasing price trends. The trend of taxation of motor fuel all over the world suggests that these items

Whoever is unable to show a correspondence between wealth and the risks undergone to acquire it, or the talents spent in its acquisition, will soon face a challenge over entitlement. The rich are regularly subject to theft, to taxation, to the expectation that their wealth be shared, as though what they have is not true compensation and therefore not completely theirs.

Currently, there is no tax for the gift giver (donor) but any gift of over Rs. 50,000 is treated as income under the head ‘Income from Other sources’ and charged to income tax as regular income for the gift receiver (donee).

Investment made for more than 36 months is considered a long term capital gain and is taxed at 20% after applying for indexation, which is about 9% p.a. As a result, return of over 9% only is taxed @ 20%.

To compensate for the gain due to inflation, CII was introduced. It means there is no capital gain if the asset has returned only to meet the inflation (CII). Any gain over and above the inflation is the real gain and tax is to be levied on only the real gain.

NRIs can invest in NCDs if The issue is available for NRIs by way of a public offer The company issuing NCD is not acting as a Nidhi or Chit fund company. The NCD has a maturity of 3 years or more. The interest rate on the NCD is not more than 3% over SBI’s prime lending rate. The borrowed funds are not to be used for agricultural/plantation or real estate business or for re-lending.

Loans NRIs can give loans to resident Indians on a repatriable or non-repatriable basis. NRIs can also receive loans from residents. Loan from NRIs in foreign currency or on a repatriable basis A resident Indian can borrow up to US dollars 250,000 from NRI close relatives on a repatriation basis i.e. on repayment, the NRI can credit the funds in an NRE account and take this money back without any restrictions. The NRI should be a close relative of the borrower. Please check ‘Who is your relative’ for details. The amount of loan should be received by an inward remittance or by debit to the NRE/FCNR account. The loan should be a minimum of 1 year and without any interest. The funds cannot be used for agricultural/plantation/real estate business or for relending. Income: As the loan should be interest-free, no income can be generated. Taxability: As there is no income, there is no tax. Loan from NRIs in Indian rupees or on a non-repatriable basis A resident, not being a company incorporated in India, may borrow in rupees from an NRI on a non- repatriation basis. The period of loan should be 3 years or less and the rate of interest should not exceed 2% over the prevailing bank rate at the time of the loan. The loan has to be utilized for meeting the borrower’s personal requirement or for his business purposes. The funds cannot be used for agricultural/plantation/real estate business or for relending or for investment in shares, securities or immovable property. For example, Ms. Isumati has given an unsecured loan to her father’s firm earning 15% interest. If she goes to the UK for further studies and becomes an NRI, while she may continue with the loan, RBI rules would apply. The funds cannot be used for real estate business and if the bank rate is 10%, she cannot be paid more than 12% interest on her loan. Her father would also need to deduct TDS @ 30.9% on the interest. Income: Income from loans given to residents is interest. Taxability: The interest income on loans given is taxable for NRIs. Loans to NRIs NRIs are allowed to borrow from a bank/authorized

To the Teachers in Our Schools My Dear Brethren and Sisters: The Lord will work in behalf of all who will walk humbly with Him. He has placed you in a position of trust. Walk carefully before Him. God’s hand is on the wheel. He will guide the ship past the rocks into the haven. He will take the weak things of this world to confound the things that are mighty. I pray that you will make God your Counselor. You are not amenable to any man, but are under God’s direction. Keep close to Him. Do not take worldly ideas as your criterion. Let there be no departure from the Lord’s methods of working. Use not common fire, but the sacred fire of the Lord’s kindling. Be of good courage in your work. For many years I have kept before our people the need, in the education of the youth, of an equal taxation of the physical and mental powers. But for those who have never proved the value of the instruction given to combine manual training with the study of books, it is hard to understand and carry out the directions given. Do your best to impart to your students the blessings God has given you. With a deep, earnest desire to help them, carry them over the ground of knowledge. Come close to them. Unless teachers have the love and gentleness of Christ abounding in their hearts, they will manifest too much of the spirit of a harsh, domineering master. The Lord wishes you to learn how to use the gospel net. That you may be successful in your work, the meshes of your net must be close. The application of the Scriptures must be such that the meaning shall be easily discerned. Then make the most of drawing in [268] the net. Come right to the point. However great a man’s knowledge, it is of no avail unless he is able to communicate it to others. Let the pathos of your voice, its deep feeling, make an impression on hearts. Urge your students to surrender themselves to God. “Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And of some have compassion, making a difference: and others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.” Jude 1:21-23. As you follow Christ’s example you will have the precious reward of seeing your students won to Him.

Whoever is unable to show a correspondence between wealth and the risks undergone to acquire it, or the talents spent in its acquisition, will soon face a challenge over entitlement. The rich are regularly subject to theft, to taxation, to the expectation that their wealth be shared, as though what they have is not true compensation and therefore not completely theirs.

The military-industrial complex came about as a result of government’s power to use stick-and-carrot methods to rule business (which was just one part of the politicians’ efforts to rule everyone). For a stick, the politicians use anti-trust laws, interstate commerce laws, pure food and drug laws, licensing laws, and a whole host of other prohibitions and regulatory legislation. Many years ago, the government succeeded in making regulatory legislation so complex, contradictory, vague, and all-encompassing that the bureaucrats could fine and imprison any businessman and destroy his business, regardless of what he did or how hard he tried to obey the law. This legal chicanery gives the bureaucrats life-and-death control over the whole business community, a control which they can and do exercise on any whim, and against which their victims have very little defense. For a carrot, the politicians hold out large and lucrative governmental contracts. By crippling the economy with regulations and bleeding it by taxation, the government has drastically cut the number of large and profitable contracts available from the private sector, which forces many businessmen to get such contracts from the government or do without them. To stay in business, businessmen must make profits, and many of them have simply accepted government contracts, either without bothering to delve into the ethical questions or with the comforting thought that they were being patriotic. Government’s stick-and-carrot control of business has been going on for so long that most businessmen accept it as normal and necessary (just as most people accept taxes as normal and necessary).

Taxation supports the spy, encourages the faction, dictates the content of newspapers.”9 In 1792 even in a quasi-liberal Britain the government owned secretly over half of the newspapers.10 As Boudreaux wrote recently, “The only sure means of keeping money out of politics is to keep politics out of money.”11 Small government. The bumper sticker on my little Smart car read, “Separation of Economy and Government.” We

government must draw all its resources from the society over which it rules. When a governmentally controlled society takes defensive action against an aggression by a foreign power, where does it get the resources necessary to take that action? The men who fight are private individuals, usually conscripted into government service. The armaments are produced by private individuals working at their jobs. The money to pay for these armaments and the pittance doled out to the conscripts, as well as the money to pay the salaries of that small minority comprising the other members of the armed forces, is confiscated from private individuals by means of taxation. Government’s only contribution is to organize the whole effort by the use of force—the force of the draft, taxation, and other, more minor coercions, such as rationing, wage and price ceilings, travel restrictions, etc. So, to maintain that government is necessary to defend a society from foreign aggression is to maintain that it is necessary to use domestic aggression against the citizens in order to protect them from foreign aggression.

The current constellation of government spending, regulation, and taxation benefits some and hurts others. But as we saw, there is little evidence that shifts in these policies would have a significant effect on economic growth. Thus the arguments over the proper level of all three are best had in terms of their effects on different groups, as opposed to their effect on aggregate growth. In particular, claims that specific policies will 'pay for themselves' in any capacity are fatuous. Government fiscal and regulatory policy is, to a large degree, about the division of the economic pie, not its size.

According to Poterba’s calculations, shown in Table 1.5, taxable investors in stocks might lose as much as 3.5 percentage points per year to taxes. In the context of a pre-tax return of 12.7 percent per year, the tax burden dramatically reduces the rewards for investing in equities. The absolute level of the tax impact on bond and cash returns falls below the impact on equity returns, but taxes consume a greater portion of current-income-intensive assets. According to Poterba’s estimates, 28 percent of gross equity returns go to the tax man, while taxes consume 38 percent of bond returns and 42 percent of cash returns. Table 1.5 Taxes Materially Reduce Investment Returns Pre-Tax and After-Tax Returns (Percent) 1926 to 1996 Source: James M. Poterba, “Taxation, Risk-Taking, and Household Portfolio Behavior,” NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper 8340 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2001), 90. Tax laws currently favor long-term gains over dividend and interest income in two ways: capital gains face lower tax rates and incur tax only when realized. The provision in the tax code that causes taxes to be due only upon realization of gains allows investors to delay payment of taxes far into the future. Deferral of capital gains taxes creates enormous economic value to investors.*

Emotion Implosion By Maisie Aletha Smikle Show your emotion Show your motion Show your devotion Show your elation and frustration Not with commotion Not with destruction But with common sense That makes sense And keep your cents Where they belong In your pockets Not funding rackets Multi tax is the norm Earning is taxed Spending is taxed Each time you buy You pay tax from earnings already taxed People's tax foot the cost for prisons Its occupants shelter and food Lobbyists gifts and donations That should be used for poverty eradication health and education Are used for commotion extravaganza and splurging Commotion costs Who pays? Not them Or else there would be none Show your emotion Not an emotion implosion That stirs up commotion And leads to increase taxation They want to be rich They want people to be poor So they levy taxes In order to get more Land is over valued so it appears that you have more But that is only done So they can scoop up more dough And leave you po

The burdens of taxation, the lack of due representation, and the desire for freedom were unquestionably integral ingredients in the accumulation of grievances that drove many colonials to take up arms against the king.22 Yet religious issues also played their part, not least in intensifying a sense of injustice over the privileged status of the Church of England in the British colonies.23

The upshot is the following: Perhaps 4 percent of extra GDP could be collected as of 2015 mainly by taxing the rich (2 percent), tightening corporate taxation (1 percent), strengthening tax enforcement (0.5 to 1 percent), taxing financial transactions, and taxing carbon emissions (0.5 percent). Introducing a VAT would raise even more revenues and could be phased in over several years. The point is that there are lots of options, and most of them could be concentrated near the top of the income distribution, where they belong. How

Someone steered them to Myron Sugarman, a San Francisco attorney who specializes in estate and taxation issues. “Myron has got clients who are worth far more than me,” Fiddler says. “He’s seen this movie over and over again.” Sugarman led the couple to the conclusion that help would be essential. You don’t just stick this kind of money in your savings account. “I realized there was going to be a lot of work involved in managing this that I had no interest in and no aptitude for,” Fiddler says. “It’s real work.” The Fiddlers needed an entourage. Enter Dennis Covington, the founder of a boutique wealth firm called Ohana Advisors.

and powerful towards both the people and the state. He reaffirms the basic cause of ‘our revolution’, No taxation without representation; he insists that government revenue ‘be kept under public control’ and not be given over to the banks to speculate with; and he endorses President Jackson’s saying ‘No where so well deposited as in the pants of the people, | Wealth ain’t’.

First, reframe the purpose of taxes to help build social consensus for the kind of higher-tax, higher-returns public sector that has been a proven success in many Scandinavian countries. And remember, the verbal framing expert George Lakoff advises to choose your words wisely: don’t oppose tax relief—talk about tax justice. Likewise, the notion of public spending is often used by those who oppose it to evoke a never-ending outlay. Public investment, on the other hand, focuses on the public goods—such as high-quality schools and effective public transport—that underpin collective well-being.57 Second, end the extraordinary injustice of tax loopholes, offshore havens, profit shifting and special exemptions that allow many of the world’s richest people and largest corporations—from Amazon to Zara—to pay negligible tax in the countries in which they live and do business. At least $18.5 trillion is hidden by wealthy individuals in tax havens worldwide, representing an annual loss of more than $156 billion in tax revenue, a sum that could end extreme income poverty twice over.58 At the same time, transnational corporations shift around $660 billion of their profits each year to near-zero tax jurisdictions such as the Netherlands, Ireland, Bermuda and Luxembourg.59 The Global Alliance for Tax Justice is among those focused on tackling this, campaigning worldwide for greater corporate transparency and accountability, fair international tax rules, and progressive national tax systems.60 Third, shifting both personal and corporate taxation away from taxing income streams and towards taxing accumulated wealth—such as real estate and financial assets—will diminish the role played by a growing GDP in ensuring sufficient tax revenue. Of course progressive tax reforms such as these can quickly encounter pushback from the corporate lobby, along with claims of state incompetence and corruption. This only reinforces the importance of strong civic engagement in promoting and defending political democracies that can hold the state to account.

Given the nearly unrestricted power of lawmaking and taxation, they ensure that actual dissent is nearly nonexistent. Every citizen has become a federal lawbreaker and we are suffocated under a tax code that few have actually read and no one fully understands. Like the Sword of Damocles, federal retribution hangs over the heads of everyone, waiting to impale anyone who steps out of line.

In order to understand how everything went to hell on January 6th, you have to understand that the District of Columbia has its own rules. The city was established as a federal district in 1790. In the years since then, Washington has gained a greater degree of autonomy and home rule, but it doesn’t operate like a normal state or city. A congressional committee reviews laws passed in the city and retains authority over its budget, and of course there’s still the thorny issue of taxation without representation in Congress. Local DC Metropolitan police officers often have to take a backseat to specialized federal police forces in the city’s many national parks and federal buildings, including the Capitol. There, the primary law enforcement agency is the US Capitol Police. According to a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) directive issued in 2003, the department’s policy is to “extend assistance” to the Capitol police if it is required.

It doesn’t matter to people in Clinton how destitute they are, how fundamentally poor the soil is, how frayed its social safety net. It doesn’t matter that the antigovernment sentiment they espouse is heading to a nihilistic endpoint calling on the government to cut valuable programs they use themselves. Or that their outrage over taxation only helps the kind of wealthy people who don’t live in Clinton. It doesn’t matter to them that they have more in common with poor people of color than with rich white people. The white women in this community don’t seem concerned that the systems they support shield their abusers and circumscribe their lives. Their inheritance came down to them as land, so that’s what they want to protect. They concentrate on their own personal redemption, even as their communities are dying. It makes them withdraw from one another, ever further from a sense of community, so that people like Darci, who suffer the most, struggle to find anything safe to grab on to.

None of these facts requires extraordinary research in esoteric places. One need only read Mellon’s book Taxation to see what he advocated, and look at the published records of the Internal Revenue Service to see what happened. Both of these sources are available in libraries or on the Internet. That renowned historians and economists failed to check these readily available sources is just one sign of what can happen in an academic monoculture where the promotion of a social vision takes precedence over the search for facts—and where there are few people with fundamentally different views who would challenge what was said.

Property rights, land ownership, and gun ownership are all tied up in this political worldview. It doesn’t matter to people in Clinton how destitute they are, how fundamentally poor the soil is, how frayed its social safety net. It doesn’t matter that the antigovernment sentiment they espouse is heading to a nihilistic endpoint calling on the government to cut valuable programs they use themselves. Or that their outrage over taxation only helps the kind of wealthy people who don’t live in Clinton. It doesn’t matter to them that they have more in common with poor people of color than with rich white people. The white women in this community don’t seem concerned that the systems they support shield their abusers and circumscribe their lives. Their inheritance came down to them as land, so that’s what they want to protect. They concentrate on their own personal redemption, even as their communities are dying. It makes them withdraw from one another, ever further from a sense of community, so that people like Darci, who suffer the most, struggle to find anything safe to grab on to.

of climate change. What was needed was a massive nudge in the right direction. In the past, the stick of regulation and the rod of taxation were the methods that environmentalists believed could break the fossil fuel economy. But the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t rely on such punitive tactics, because Manchin culled them from the bill. Instead, it imagined that the United States could become the global leader of a booming climate economy, if the government provided tax credits and subsidies, a lucrative set of incentives. There was a cost associated with the bill. By the Congressional Budget Office’s score, it offered $386 billion in tax credits to encourage the production of wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal plants, and battery storage. Tax credits would reduce the cost of electric vehicles so that they would become the car of choice for Middle America. But $386 billion was an estimate, not a price tag, since the legislation didn’t cap the amount of money available in tax credits. If utilities wanted to build more wind turbines or if demand for electric vehicles surged, the government would keep spending. When Credit Suisse studied the program, it estimated that so many businesses and consumers will avail themselves of the tax credits that the government could spend nearly $800 billion. If Credit Suisse is correct, then the tax credits will unleash $1.7 trillion in private sector spending on green technologies. Within six years, solar and wind energy produced by the US will be the cheapest in the world. Alternative energies will cross a threshold: it will become financially irresponsible not to use them. Even though Joe Biden played a negligible role in the final negotiations, the Inflation Reduction Act exudes his preferences. He romanticizes the idea of factories building stuff. It is a vision of the Goliath of American manufacturing, seemingly moribund, sprung back to life. At the same time that the legislation helps to stall climate change, it allows the United States to dominate the industries of the future. This was a bill that, in the end, climate activists and a broad swath of industry could love. Indeed, strikingly few business lobbies, other than finance and pharma, tried to stymie the bill in its final stages. It was a far cry from the death struggles over energy legislation in the Clinton and Obama administrations, when industry scuppered transformational legislation. The Inflation Reduction Act will allow the United States to prevent its own decline. And not just economic decline. Without such a meaningful program, the United States would have had no standing to prod other countries to respond more aggressively to climate change. It would have been a marginal player in shaping the response to the planet’s greatest challenge. The bill was an investment in moral authority.

We expect the cybereconomy to evolve through several stages. 1. The most primitive manifestations of the Information Age involve the Net simply as an information medium to facilitate what are otherwise ordinary industrial-era transactions. At this point, the Net is no more than an exotic delivery system for catalogues. Virtual Vineyards, for example, one of the first cybermerchants, simply sells wine from a page on the World Wide Web. Such transactions are not yet directly subversive of the old institutions. They employ industrial currency, and take place within identifiable jurisdictions. These uses of the Internet have little such megapolitical impact. 2. An intermediate stage of Internet commerce will employ information technology in ways that would have been impossible in the industrial era, such as in long-distance accounting or medical diagnosis. More examples of these new applications of advanced computational power are spelled out below. The second stage of Net commerce will still function within the old institutional framework, employing national currencies and submitting to the jurisdiction of nation-states. The merchants who employ the Net for sales will not yet employ it to bank their profits, only to earn revenues. These profits made on Internet transactions will still be subject to taxation. 3. A more advanced stage will mark the transition to true cybercommerce. Not only will transactions occur over the Net, but they will migrate outside the jurisdiction of nation-states. Payment will be rendered in cybercurrency. Profits will be booked in cyberbanks. Investments will be made in cyberbrokerages. Many transactions will not be subject to taxation. At this stage, cybercommerce will begin to have significant megapolitical consequences of the kind we have already outlined. The powers of governments over traditional areas of the economy will be transformed by the new logic of the Net. Extraterritorial regulatory power will collapse. Jurisdictions will devolve. The structure of firms will change, and so will the nature of work and employment.

It is arguably the control of legislatures and taxation that makes national governments pre-eminent among the social institutions whose actions mould the character of everyday life. By stipulating in laws what must and what must not be done, and by exercising its control over the resources necessary to do those things, the national government—and with it, the nation-State—retains its primary importance.

He developed a program offering government assistance, including loans and exemptions from taxation, to widows and widowers, orphans, and elderly people with no children. Grain, wine, and meat were to be given out each month to people who were older than 80 years of age; cloth and cotton were provided for those over the age of 90.

All this unfettered taxation, of course, raises the question, “If these investments are 100% taxable, why have them at all?” The answer is liquidity. Generally speaking, it’s easy to get your hands on these investments, which means that they make for great emergency funds. Financial experts generally agree that we should have roughly six months’ worth of income in these accounts as a buffer against life’s unexpected emergencies. Having too little means that we can be forced to withdraw money from illiquid investments, incurring unwanted taxes or penalties. Having too much, on the other hand, means that we can be disproportionately affected by the rise of taxes over time. From a tax-efficiency perspective, therefore, investments in this bucket should be just the right amount: about six months’ worth of income.

Certainly there is no limit to taxation if the benefits derived from public services by society measure up to the cost in taxation.”2 As cited in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, Obama Sr. is even willing to consider tax rates up to 100 percent! It’s remarkable that this paper by Obama Sr. has gotten so little media coverage. One would expect it to be on the front page of every newspaper and a lead item on the evening news, especially during public debates in America over taxes and massive government intervention in the health care and financial sectors. Notice the two-part economic strategy proposed by Obama Sr.: forced state control over private enterprise, and confiscatory tax rates with no upper limit. We will find it instructive to compare this to President Obama’s economic policies. For example, President Obama frequently talks about people being forced to pay their “fair share” in taxes, but he never specifies what that share is. Here, we have a document that explicitly states his father’s thoughts on the subject and may provide some guidance to the son’s own thinking. Yet for many in the media, these father-son comparisons are completely taboo. For them, it seems, the ghost of Barack Obama Sr. must be quietly ignored, so it cannot be seen haunting the corridors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

war. This is true whether it’s a Republican or Democratic-leaning entity. Both sides spout the lies delivered by government officials to encourage public support for wars. Whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat, the media will be supportive. It just may be that the owners of the large media entities are closely connected to the military-industrial complex. Our economic policy, and in particular the Federal Reserve, is intertwined in global finance and our foreign policy. Without the power over the creation of money and credit employed by the politicians and central bankers working in secret, most wars could not be fought. The people would never tolerate the taxation and borrowing required to pay for the wars. Inflating the currency is more convenient and less noticeable. To the benefit of those who promote war, the cost of war is hidden and the payment delayed.

The true remedy for such an injurious condition is to strengthen the regional bases and limit the control and absorption of the national finances by the central executive. That is what the Charter was intended to do; with a wisdom in advance of the age, it did not propose either penalization or expulsion of "the jews" or financiers, but restriction of the authority of the crown. Here it may be said that at any time when finance is under attack through the political authority, it is an infallible sign that the political authority is already exercising too much power over the economic life of the nation through manipulation of finance, whether by exorbitant taxation, uncontrolled expenditure, unlimited borrowing, or currency depreciation.

The ancient principle, that rule was its own sole reward and that such rule was as much a duty and a burden as a privilege and a benefit, was allowed to fall wholly into abeyance. Thus there arose the new state-economy, which turned its eyes away from the taxation of the burgesses, but regarded the body of subjects, on the other hand, as a profitable possession of the community, which it partly worked out for the public benefit, partly handed over to be worked out by the burgesses. Not only was free scope allowed with criminal indulgence to the unscrupulous greed of the Roman merchant in the provincial administration, but even the commercial rivals who were disagreeable to him were cleared away by the armies of the state, and the most glorious cities of neighbouring lands were sacrificed, not to the barbarism of the lust of power, but to the far more horrible barbarism of speculation. By the ruin of the earlier military organization, which certainly imposed heavy burdens on the burgesses, the state, which was solely dependent in the last resort on its military superiority, undermined its own support.

Manmohan Singh’s lost opportunity The anti-corruption agitations of 2011 provided a wonderful opportunity for the prime minister and his government to start the process of purging the system of corruption and retrieving black money illegally stashed away in foreign banks. The government had two options to get our money back. The first, to behave like a responsible, honourable and strong nation and demonstrate political will to fight corruption using the ample machinery available through international and bilateral legal instruments, the Tax Information Exchange Treaties (TIEAs), Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements (DTAAs) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) automatic exchange route. The Swiss have volunteered cooperation; and India can follow the example of the US and UK, and get India’s stolen money back to the country. Or, the government can take the other option and behave like a banana republic and a failed state, plunder capital from their own country through a UPA-sponsored version of imperialism, perpetuate poverty and backwardness by denying the people of this country their rightful development dividend while repeatedly rewarding and incentivizing the looters with amnesty schemes. Mr Singh’s government has continuously concealed information on black money by fooling the people of our country, shielding the corrupt and guilty who have illegal bank accounts in foreign banks, and by creating obstacles for any progress in the matter instead of taking proactive measures to obtain the information from the foreign governments concerned. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could have chosen the former option and gone down in history as a great patriot and leader of our country, a pioneer against corruption. But sadly, he has lost the opportunity and chosen such, that history will remember him as having presided over the greatest frauds practised on this poor and gullible nation.

Because it was relatively small and owned so much, the Roman landowning elite was potentially highly vulnerable to attack from the many who were less fortunate. And when all the bullshit about rational, divinely inspire social order is put to one side, Roman law was all about defining and protecting property rights, so that the state-generated and state-supported legal system was the basic prop of the established elite’s social dominance. This indeed was the quid pro quo which made them willing to raise and pay over taxation in return.

The majority is almost certainly wrong. If you can, try contributing to the global market, not the local one. If you face excessive regulation or over-taxation, move to another country.

When an "evil" becomes customary, it tends to lose the negative value put on it and in men's minds tends to become a "good." And so, we hear much these days in praise of the very kind of government which the Founding Fathers tried to prevent by their blueprint; that is, of a paternalistic establishment ruling for and over a subject people. A virtue has been made of what was once considered a vice. This transmutation of political values has been accompanied by a transmutation of moral values, as a matter of necessity; people who have no rights are presumably without free will; at least, there is no call for the exercise of free will (as in the case of a slave) when a paternalistic government assumes the obligations of living. Why, for instance, should one be charitable when the government provides for the incompetent or the unfortunate? Why should one be honest when all that is necessary to "get by" is to obey the law? Why should one give thought to one's future when the matter can be left to a munificent government? And, with the government providing "free" schooling, including "free" lunches, even the parents' obligations to their children can be sloughed off.