"The Ultimate Impossibility of Tax Reform!"
from - The Parallax Prophecies -
By Ron Ewart, President
National Association of Rural Landowners
and nationally recognized author on freedom and property rights issues.
We are helping to spread freedom and liberty around the globe.
© Copyright Sunday, January 6, 2013 - All Rights Reserved
article also available at: http://www.narlo.org/articles/010613.html
"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow." James Madison, Federalist No. 62, February 27, 1788
Today, according to the U. S. Government Printing Office, Title 26 of the U. S. Code of Federal Regulations(the part written by the IRS) is 13,458 pages. When you add the part written by Congress, the grand total comes to 16,845 pages. Let's just say that there are 1,000 words to each page, that produces a word count of 16,845,000 words to govern the taxing of income in the United States. (NOTE: There are 783,000 words in the bible) In contrast, the Revenue Act of 1913, which established the Income Tax as the principal debt collector for the loans to the government from the Federal Reserve, was a few pages and the bottom tax rate (no deductions) was 1% over an income threshold of $3,000 and the top rate was 7% over income of $500,000. It was the first introduction of the progressive income tax where large wage earners would be charged a higher rate than lower wage earners, in direct violation of the equal protection clause of the U. S. Constitution. (we have covered this unconstitutional inequity in previous articles)
Since 1913 an entire industry has been built up around the income tax that includes accountants, certified public accountants, tax advisors, tax attorneys, tax courts and around an estimated 100,000 IRS employees. With the implementation of Obama Care, the number of IRS employees could rise by another 16,000. That equals an annual outlay of around $10,000,000,000 (Billion with a "B") in just salaries to administer the American income tax system. This doesn't even begin to cover the amount of time that individual and corporate filers must spend to pay their income tax, or the enormous cost paid to tax preparers, or the cost paid to tax attorneys to fight the IRS on disputed income amounts or deductions. This isn't freedom, it is outright enslavement, pure and simple and yet the sheeple of America put up with it.
SIDEBAR: Several years ago, the IRS, in an audit of our business, levied an additional $15,000 to our tax liability. We called a tax attorney to challenge the additional levy and the tax attorney told us it would cost considerably more than $15,000 in attorney's fees and court costs to challenge them. We paid the $15,000 under protest. A lot of good that did!
The net result of Congress passing the Revenue Act of 1913 and building upon its complexity over the last 100 years, is the institutionalization of a highly complex and convoluted taxing system that has so much inertia attached to it, to fundamentally change it will take an act of God. Any attempts to reform it will be met with massive opposition and those attempts will be soundly defeated in Congress. In fact, "The Parallax Prophecies" predicts that the tax code will only get more complicated, not less and when a politician (including the president) screams that we must change the tax code, he is bloviating at best and lying at worst. They created a monster and the monster NOW OWNS THEM and us.
Let's just say that Congress decided to simplify the tax code such that all an individual or corporate filer had to do was to determine the amount of income they earned in the year, multiply the total annual income times some percentage agreed upon by Congress, then send in a check with their three-line tax form. Most of the 100,000 IRS employees would be laid off, hundreds of thousands of accountants and CPA's would be out of work and on welfare and/or unemployment compensation and tax attorneys would go back to chasing ambulances for personal injury cases. Even small changes to simplify the code would be met with noisy protests from those whose livelihood depends on it, if their livelihoods would be significantly affected by the change. However, the more complicated the tax code gets, the more these leaches, who hang their hats on a massive, complex government taxing system, would cheer.
And one other point that is missed by many is the irrational desire by Congress to manipulate the economy and reward losers and pick winners through "social engineering" by "tweaking" the tax code. Certainly you don't think that they want to give up this power to yank on our puppet strings every now and then do you?
Simplify, or significantly change the tax code ..... in your dreams!
But this government institutionalization gets even far worse than just the Internal Revenue Service. As government has grown, so have its bureaucracies. We have the U. S. Department of Education-ED(enacted 1979, 4,300 employees, $60 Billion Budget); the U. S. Department of Energy-DOE (enacted 1973, over 16,000 employees, $40 Billion budget); the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency-EPA (enacted 1970, over 17,000 employees, $9 Billion budget); the U. S. Housing and Urban Development-HUD (enacted 1965, about 10,000 employees, $42 Billion budget); the U. S. Department of Agriculture-USDA (established 1889, over 100,000 employees, $120 Billion budget); the U. S. Health and Human Services Department-HHS (established 1979, over 70,000 employees, $79 Billion Budget, before Obama Care). (sources: wiki and US government websites)
It doesn't stop with the ones we have listed above. There are a total of 15 cabinet level bureaucracies, each containing thousands of employees and having budgets in the multi-billions of dollars. Most of these agencies have a social imperative ..... an insatiable need to spend your money on their version of compassion or crony capitalism. All of these bureaucracies are under the direct control of the president. Each bureaucracy writes rules and regulations that circumvent Article I, Section 1 of the U. S. Constitution and receive little oversight from the Congress accept for budget approval, which is rarely denied. To get an idea of the scope of the bureaucracies we invite you to log onto:
In 2010, Obama and the Democrats in the U. S. Congress shoved the 2,700-page Obama Care (Affordable Care Act) down our throats without a single Republican vote. The Democrats aren't much interested in bi-partisan support unless it suits their purposes. The number of employees and the budget required to implement and administer Obama Care is not known other than OMB scoring, which is a joke. If history is our guide for any other U. S. Government program, Obama Care will cost several factors more than initial projections. Estimates of several trillion dollars are floating around.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is the law of survival and nature that each living entity forms a protective layer around its perimeter. The entity works tirelessly to defend itself against internal and external forces that would sicken it or kill it. The larger the organism is, the more resources it needs to not only keep it alive, but to keep it growing. By the very act of being alive, the entity is mandated to grow. If it has no enemies, the organism becomes an insatiable beast that consumes everything around it, not unlike a black hole. It invades other territories as it grows. The larger it is, the greater are its defenses and the harder it is for outside forces to reduce it in size or render it extinct.
Government and agencies within government, follow this inviolate rule. Their "food" to keep alive is your tax money. As they grow, they need more and more of your tax money, as they develop more creative reasons(think social justice) to grow. They are essentially unstoppable by normal legislative means, having a life and defense mechanisms of their own. Limiting them or trying to disband them by legislation simply won't work. The only way to stop them is to deprive them of their "food". But how do you deprive them of their "food" if a gun is being held to your head with a mandate that you will "feed" them, or else? What it comes down to is:".... will you capitulate to the beast, or will you resist it?"
This is the choice we must make, whether the issue is the brainwashing of our children in public schools, letting millions of illegal aliens into America and giving them amnesty, inadequate border patrol, putting up with the irrational and ever-growing rules and regulations of the IRS, the confiscation of our guns, giving into Obama Care, draconian environmental regulations, the federal control of our money, our food, our water, our energy, our land and our health care, United Nations unconstitutional mandates, a main stream press that is in the tank for the Progressive ideology and a whole host of other actions or in-actions we must endure at the hands of our local, state and federal government. When the door of absolute control finally closes, the only viable alternative to regain our freedom is violence ..... that is if we let peaceful solutions slip through our fingers as we are doing now.
With all of the above in mind, it will be virtually impossible to simplify the IRS Tax Code, or any other government program, unless we deprive them of their "food" ..... our tax money.
After watching the end-of-the-year and last-minute farce of compromise to stop America from going over the fiscal cliff, there is little chance that our national, or our local problems will be fixed by our local, state, or federal representatives. It would be like trying to stop an avalanche.
It is said that if the "driver" of any vehicle (train, bus, bicycle, car, ship, rocket, or airplane, or legislative body) is behaving erratically, you must replace the "driver", or, take over the driving, that is if you can even get to the driver's seat. Which is it going to be folks? To replace the "drivers" will take guts, lots of money and millions of united Americans on the principles of freedom. Are we there yet ..... probably not! Will we get there? Maybe!
Millions of Americans are more worried about what Kanye and Kim Kardupein's baby is going to look like, than the ultimate fate of their country.
Ron Ewart, President
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF RURAL LANDOWNERS
P. O. Box 1031, Issaquah, WA 98027
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