This country fought a war for independence over taxation without representation. The Founders really, really didn’t like taxes. They dressed up as Indians at the Boston Tea Party. Over a pretty small tax on tea. They became incensed over a similarly modest tax on stamps. Our forebears called these things the Intolerable Acts.

Since the early 1770s, our increasingly tyrannical government has implemented a lot of Intolerable Acts. Many people don’t realize that, until 1913, there was no income tax in the United States. You may well ask, how did they fund the government for well over a century without one? We had a growing military force, which Thomas Jefferson and the other wisest Founders would have opposed, a post office, roads and bridges. The odious withholding tax, which the beloved Franklin D. Roosevelt assured us would be but a temporary measure, dates from the 1930s. But as with so many unconstitutional encroachments, the concept began under Abraham Lincoln, to help fund his senseless war. As everyone knows, they are still withholding a portion of pay for every employee on a payroll. 10 Costly Medicare Mis... Roberts, Danielle Kunkle Best Price: $2.24 Buy New $9.99 (as of 01:12 UTC - Details)

I’m brooding over this subject, after having our taxes prepared last week. I knew we’d probably owe money, because all of the income I earn now is untaxed. I write off what expenses I can against it, but really anything more than negligible untaxed income is going to destroy any chance of a refund. Now most of my income comes from Social Security. You know, the money they withheld from me for forty five years or so. I’m pretty sure that fits the definition of a tax. I thought I knew how bad the system was, but having had my taxes done after collecting Social Security for the first time, I became a bit more educated. It is even worse that I expected, which is really saying something.

I knew that, thanks to the beloved tax-cutter Ronald Reagan, you have to pay tax on your Social Security earnings, if your other income exceeds $32,000. They can tax eighty five percent of your Social Security income if you make more than that. But as I discovered, they include your spouse’s income on this putrid deal. This double tax. So, basically, anyone collecting Social Security while their younger spouse keeps working, has the spouse’s income added to the total. $32,000 isn’t much of an income for an older adult who’s been working for decades. So you can then opt to file separately, which we did for the first time in thirty eight years of marriage. But, wait- they have that covered, too. If you file separately, the Social Security recipient can only make half of the $32,000 without being taxed. So, either way you’re screwed.

It astonishes me that no one on the Right ever points out that taxing Social Security is a tax on a tax. I thought the Right hated taxes. But then, Ronald Reagan claimed to hate taxes, too, and the same “conservatives” who still claim to hate them, revere him as an icon, and never point out how he took Lyndon Johnson’s comingling of the Social Security fund with the general budget a step farther, while ignoring his horrific measure to tax individual benefits. Reagan the great tax-cutter only cut taxes on the very wealthiest Americans. The poorest Americans saw an increase in the tax rate. And because he kept raising Social Security taxes, and that tax is incomprehensibly capped for those with wealth, it was another harsh tax increase on the poor, the working class, and the already dwindling middle class.

As I’ve said so often, what does our income tax even fund? Last Saturday, I watched and commented on the late Aaron Russo’s excellent documentary, Freedom to Fascism. I’ve been doing this most every Saturday at 9 pm eastern, with Brian D. Roberts of the Next News Network, and my good friend from down under Australian Ben. The film really documents how the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, authorizing a graduated income tax, was never legally ratified. Some patriots have won in court, when the prosecution couldn’t produce that law that requires one to file an income tax. However, others have lost, despite the absence of a documented law. I hate giving my money to these monsters, but it’s hard to risk taking a chance now in our weaponized, politicized injustice system. I certainly don’t trust judges or juries.

I have all the statistics in Survival of the Richest, but the “graduated” part of our income tax is negated by all the loopholes that favor the wealthy. When you combine this unfair system of taxation, with our counterfeit banking system, overseen by the privately owned Federal Reserve (created in the same year as the income tax), you begin to understand the extent of the problem. Remember, my hero Huey Long was smeared as a “socialist” and even a “communist.” His Share our Wealth program would have exempted the first million dollars of income from any taxation whatsoever. That would be equivalent to about twelve million today. His plan would have targeted the absolute lop level of the One Percent, and benefited the poor. Typical modern “liberal” schemes redistribute wealth from the middle class to the absolute elite.

Aaron Russo’s film showed how the income tax doesn’t seem to directly fund anything that we think it does. Gasoline taxes, for example, fund the infrastructure. I know, I’m laughing as I type that. But they’re supposed to, in the unlikely event they ever start a significant infrastructure project. They tell us our property taxes, which obviously would have gotten the Founders really worked up, fund our public schools. You know, that ones that teach critical race theory and support transgender story hour. Just imagine if you kept being taxed on television, or a computer, for instance, in perpetuity. That’s exactly what happens with houses. And cars. The Republicans were up in arms about this twenty years or so ago, and they actually started the process of eliminating them in the state of Virginia. But that just vanished down the memory hole, like term limits and auditing the Fed. 5-Minute Core Exercise... Dzenitis, Tami Brehse Best Price: $3.38 Buy New $4.95 (as of 05:36 UTC - Details)

So what do our income taxes pay for? Government salaries, perhaps? For untold numbers of bureaucrats who serve no good purpose? For the intelligence agencies, whose budgets remain top secret? There are governments to overthrow, and elections to rig, at home and abroad. So how could they not keep the amount spent on such things classified? We know that Social Security and Medicare taxes are just mixed in with the general fund, and then taxed again when they’re paid back in increments. It’s a Gipper thing, you wouldn’t understand. If our runaway government was like every home’s budget, there would have to be an accounting of payments and receipts. I don’t think the average taxpayer can see an accounting ledger like that.

I think we’d all agree that property taxes, for instance, are far more inconsistent with human liberty than say, those tea and state taxes were in the 1770s. Imagine the Boston Tea Party we could have today. But it doesn’t usually pay to be a tax protester. Remember Gordon Kahl? Killed in a shootout with law enforcement in the 1980s. As even the mainstream media admitted at the time, Kahl was totally law abiding in every respect but one; he recognized that there was no legal requirement to file income taxes. His son, Yorrie, was given a draconian prison sentence. I think he’s still alive. He’d make a great guest for my podcast. If anyone has any information about him, or his contact info, please let me know.

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