About Your Taxes

John Stossel has a sobering column about your taxes. "...by 1999, government cost every man, woman and child an average of more than $10,000 per year -- more than housing and health care combined."

"...the "concentrated benefits-diffuse costs" problem: The benefits of any given government program go to a few, but the costs are spread among many. If sheep and goat ranchers get $200 million in handouts, it costs each of us less than $1. What are you going to do about that? Go to Washington and protest? For a buck, you probably won't even write your congressman, let alone take him out to dinner or give him a $2,000 campaign contribution. Yet the sheep ranchers have an incentive to spend $199 million lobbying if it gets them a $200 million subsidy back. Economists call it rent-seeking. Of course, even the sheep ranchers would be better off if the government stuck to its basic purposes. But it makes no sense for them to pay for everyone else's programs and not demand their own."

The Alternative Minimum Tax is catching many families now -- and is structurally anti-family.

But I shouldn't be worried about paying too much tax, according to Senator Clinton. I should be paying more into a centrally-planned government driven economic system where the "smart" people in political power redistribute money to where it is needed.

I'm going to go read my copy of the US Constitution again, and think fondly of days before the 16th Amendment.