Former Sen. Tom Daschle is gone. He's taken himself out of nomination as Obama's health and human services secretary because of his failure to pay taxes on perks he "earned" as a consultant providing corporations access to the government power he once held. He was to be the architect of the brave new medical system that is to replace our wild, dog-eat-dog, frontier free-market system. (When are we going to see the first government involvement in the system?)
Whenever someone like Daschle bites the dust in this way, all of Washington, including the so-called opposition party and the news media, get downright teary: How tragic that this good, talented, dedicated, hardworking, nice man won't be able to serve his country. Is anything more indicative of the class conflict inherent in the system? It truly is them against us.
There's nothing tragic about Daschle's fall, of course. It's one fewer parasite to feed overtly off the taxpaying hosts. (He'll have to go covert again.) The tragedy is that there are dozens eager to take his place.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
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There's nothing tragic about Daschle's fall, of course. It's one fewer parasite to feed overtly off the taxpaying hosts. (He'll have to go covert again.) The tragedy is that there are dozens eager to take his place.
Which of course has already happened. Trying to eradicate tax parasites is an even more impossible task than trying to eliminate cockroaches, the latter being definitely less toxic to humanity.
Sheldeon, I guess I'm just stupid. I can't understand how those in the ruling class think they can get away with tax evasion. But it seems they do, all the time. Do they blame their accountants? Do they pretend they weren't aware? Shouldn't they be prosecuted? Oh, yeah, I forgot, that's only for the likes of you and me.
Actually, Mimi, no one who works for the government pays taxes. In a sense, they all get away with tax evasion. This an accounting fiction to fool us into thinking government employees share the burden of government equally with the rest of us.
There are two kinds of people, net tax payers and net tax receivers (tax eaters). If I pay you $100 per year, and you pay me $20 per year, then I'm just paying you $80 per year, even if you fill out a form and mail me a check.
Here is another angle: Suppose both you and a bureaucrat earn $100k per year and pay $30k in taxes. You're both netting $70k per year. If by some benevolent miracle taxes were abolished, your pay would go up to $100k. But the bureaucrat's pay would drop to zero. That proves that the sense in which the bureaucrat pays taxes is completely different from the sense in which you pay taxes. The former is the exploiter, the latter is the exploited.
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