A Maryland woman keeps very good records of the taxes her family pays. She got upset by Obama’s comment about paying our fair share. So, she tallied up the taxes. They approach 30% of the family’s income.
The hidden taxes are everywhere, she discovered.
“I just started looking through all of our receipts and tax filings from the past year and made columns for each,” she explained. The middle class Dundalk, MD, resident notes that she had to expand her list a number of times due to the hidden taxes she kept discovering. The average entry features a relatively small amount, sometimes only pennies, but it is all there. Gas taxes, state and federal taxes, special Maryland alcohol tax, cell phone taxes and “Bay Restoration Fees,” road tolls, mandatory union dues, and on and on.
Scanlon’s list grew and grew — and it’s growing and growing. It is now 18 columns wide.
What really rings her chimes is the phone bill.
“Telephone fees include: MD 911 fee, Federal Excise Tax, MD local tax, Federal Universal Service fee, MD Gross Receipts Tax surcharge, Telecommunications Access of MD fee, Federal Subscriber line charge, Md State sales tax, PEG Grant fee, Regulatory Recovery Fee – Federal, Video Franchise Fee.”
She expects that her tax bill will reach 30% of income by December 31.
“The government takes almost three times more than the church,” the devoted Presbyterian notes, “but the government dose not do even a fraction of the good that the church does.”
For more details, click the link.
My favorite gripe are the miscellaneous taxes that show up on the gas and electric bill! I live in Illinois, and I often pay more in taxes, fees, federal this, state that, than I actually pay for the electricity and gas. The add-on taxes and fees frequently double the amount of my bill. Making it more aggravating is, you can sign up with these cut-rate electric providers and shave perhaps 5% or 10% off your electric this does NOT shave off any of the taxes and fees! Those remain in place. And, if Obozo is re-elected, he's promised to cause our electric bills to skyrocket. I'm old enough that I grew up with kerosene lamps for lighting. I suspect I might end up using them again! Except Obozo is driving up the cost of kerosene, too!
30% in Taxes. Pharaoh Collected 20%.
Better yet, Yahweh (God of the Bible) requires only 10% of one's increase, and amount anyone with an increase can afford, and which no one is required to pay unless they have an increase.
For more, see Chapter 25 "Amendment 16: Graduated Income Tax vs. Flat Increase Tax" of "Bible Law vs. the United States Constitution: The Christian Perspective" at http://www.missiontoisrael.org/biblelaw-constitut…. See also our Constitution Survey in the right-hand side bar by which you will receive a free copy of the 85-page "Primer" of the book just mentioned.
I don't know if I'd call union dues a tax or not, but the point is very well-taken.
"Fair share" my foot! Time to go to the Fair Tax or a modified 9-9-9 (add a personal exemption equal to the poverty line for each family and add back withholding to make sure a tax is paid.) This foolishness all needs to be put to an end.
If a robber showed up every other Friday, put a gun in your ribs, and demanded 30% of your paycheck, eventually you'd show up with a gun a shoot him.
Government does it, and what? Nothing…
It may be technically possible – although hard, as this woman is finding out – to total up how much taxes we are paying DIRECTLY. But it is impossible to truly estimate how much of the total wealth of society the government is destroying, as opposed to siphoning. Consider…everything you buy has taxes added into its price at every level. Everything we buy is made more expensive by a dump-truck of rules and regulations. And it all has a multiplicative effect on the total economy. One author estimates that the government ACTUALLY reduces our total wealth by 7/8ths. This seems more accurate to me than the 30% that you can actually count up.
My parents now Pops because mom died — pay taxes in 4 counties because their property line some how falls within each although they are not located within them all – and also pay other taxes for other regions that deem they are liable.
Actually it can be more than 10% with the poll tax and other taxes considered such as the corners to ones fields OR it could actually be less as situation dictates. Some of the "tax" was consumed by the people themselves – not all of it went to priests and government officials, and not every year – depends where you were in the cycle of release – example 3 yr tithe.
No only was the monitory taxed, so in a sense was their time as in the sabbath day of rest – medical reasons and others aside – it was a prohibition against "WORK" / potential for gain.
And Yahweah only allows taxing ONCE one receives their "income Gain."
He also allows FORCED LABOR and that could be considered a tax as well 🙂
The Godly system is short, sweet and integrated within all His way of life – no one need to have a doctorate degree and still have discrepancy to OTHERS who are supposed experts to what was due. Yahweah,s system is straight forward and changes not.
Actually, not counting the poll tax, all taxes combined come to 13.3 %. The festival tithe does not come out of the original tithe or the poor tithe, but is a separate tithe altogether and since it's to one's self is not added into the 13.3%. I didn't want to complicate this for the average reader so I chose not to mention it in my original post. However, all of this is dealt with in the article I cited above.
Taxation at all levels, including hidden taxes that drive up the price of every consumer good, is probably closer to 50%.
When people point to other countries like Sweden and Europe and say "Look how much higher their taxes are! We Americans are SO blessed!" what they don't factor in is that those countries spend the taxes collected on their own people in the form of infrastructure improvements, education, etc. We Americans get fleeced for comparable amounts but the money gets showered over Wall Street and the defense-security contractors.