The citizens of Illinois look to be held hostage once again by a Democrat-controlled legislature, including the gang’s leader, Gov. Pat Quinn, as a major push is underway to raise the state income tax by a whopping 75%. Senate President John Cullerton is quoted as saying about the proposed increase that “it's the right time to do it because we are in desperate need of paying our bills.”
OK, but...just what are your bills? I don’t mean generally...I mean specifically.
The flaw in the position of every liberal pro-tax warrior is that they are eager to couch the mechanism of taxation as the means by which to pay for “essential services,” and that anyone who doesn’t pay their “fair share” is essentially a robber-baron, because hey, don’t we all use roads, and stoplights, and public parks?
Except…the government dole represents a lot more than truly essential services…and that’s the problem. The socialist-minded want the average guy to assume that everything that’s covered by the wallets of the people is worthwhile and should be perpetuated at taxpayer expense. The concept of “essential,” in terms of taxes, has become, for regular citizens, the quintessential example of the moving goalposts. The definition of what qualifies constantly changes, but rarely does so in the form of a contraction.
How many six-figure-salary civil servants are there in Illinois? How much taxpayer money is used to cover the union pensions of government workers? What about the possible burden on publicly-funded resources from illegal immigration into the state? The questions that can be asked by the citizens of Illinois as well as by those of every other state in the country to help clarify just where tax money is going are endless, and yet it’s difficult to get anyone to answer them in a meaningful, feet-to-the-fire sort of way.
Most people, and certainly all of the sane ones, who are “anti-tax” are not really “anti-tax” in an unqualified, unequivocal sense. Assuming you want to live in some semblance of a real society, you are happy to part with a reasonable portion of what you make to fund truly essential services. However, until the people who make those “contributions” get a regular, definitive, and specific say in just how that money…all of it…is spent, then the politicians who continue to propose ludicrous things like tax increases to the tune of 75% at a pop will have the benefit of defining just what qualifies as “essential,” to the detriment of the citizens who are actually doing the bulk of the paying.
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Bob Yetman, Editor-at-Large at Christian Money.com (www.christianmoney.com), is an author of a variety of materials on personal finance and investing, as well as on topics of fitness and self defense, to include the book Investor's Passport to Hedge Fund Profits (John Wiley & Sons, Inc; www.investorspassport.com) and the unarmed combat training DVD Thunderstrikes - How to Develop One Shot, One Kill Striking Power (Paladin Press; www.mikereevesonline.com).
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