Or rather, 7 reasons your taxes will go up if you let them . . .
1. The first reason is that politicians say they won’t, and politicians need to lie about things like this. The most recent instance of this was Obama’s promise that if you make under 250K your taxes will go up no how, no way. He is now considering a VAT tax, which will soak everybody.
2. If the VAT tax is added, that doesn’t mean that the other taxes will disappear. H.L. Mencken put it this way. “When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before.” And the two forms of taxation added together will be a tax increase, even if one or the other of them happens to go down. And the two component taxes won’t necessarily go down.
3. We do not yet understand where the greed really is. In our public discourse, greed is still defined as people wanting to keep their own money, and it is never, ever defined as oily functionaries wanting to take that money away from them. In the Bible, greed is wanting to take other people’s money. In this perverse system, those who want to do that are “the altruistic ones,” and those who are not so sure are the greedy ones. Those who object to the nature of our tax system are still way too defensive about this. But we ought not have any trouble recognizing that our taxes are too high, too complicated, and utterly unjust and corrupt. The same three things apply to those who levy the taxes.
4. Following up on one element of #3, the officials who make these atrocious decisions have sandbagged themselves into pretty secure positions. Turnovers in the Senate are comparable to the rate of turnovers in the old Politburo. The officials are too “high” — they are like gargoyles on a cathedral, out of reach, ugly, and hard to knock off. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try!
5. In the olden days, the moral authority rested with those who, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, said that they liked to pay taxes because it was the price of civilization. In these modern times, when some of us are starting to wonder just how much more civilization we can take, the situation is different. When tax rates are at a just level, Holmes has a plausible and compelling argument. But when they get the way they are now, the moral authority needs to shift. It needs to shift because our current tax code is simply legalized plunder, and it is immoral to support legalized plunder. But the moral authority, while it is in the process of shifting on this issue, has not yet shifted completely. We need to return to the common wisdom of Calvin Coolidge, who said that “collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.”
6. We still think that our tax code is sensible because we think we have not yet gotten to the levels of Peter the Great in the early 18th century. He taxed births, funerals, beds, kitchen chimneys, firewood, and mustaches. We are not at that ridiculous point, or so we think. But we do pay taxes when we flip a light switch, flush a toilet, make a phone call, and so on. The difference is that our governments have figured out how to collect a multitude of taxes surreptitiously. If everybody got a bill on Wednesday for all the taxes they are currently paying for, and it was all clearly itemized, the tax revolt would begin promptly on Thursday morning, 8 a.m.
7. Tax revolt movies are not yet popular. But Robin Hood is due to be released soon — and since we have a budding tax revolt, one that likes costumes, we shall see how many Robin Hood outfits start showing up at tea parties. King John of Robin Hood fame was forced to sign the Magna Carta, and he promised that he would not raise taxes without consulation with others, unless it was for ransoming his own person, making his eldest son a knight, or for marrying off his eldest daughter. Those are reasonable exceptions, I think. I can live with that. So let us wait and see how many Robin Hood costumes join up with the Founding Father costumes.