U.S. TAX SYSTEM: THE GREATEST SCAM OF ALL

Tax day is over. Good riddance to this day of legalized thievery.

Indeed, Congress perpetrated the greatest tax scam in American history in 1943 when it enacted the automatic payroll withholding for federal taxes.

This serves as a Novacaine on Americans’ psyche on what they’re actually paying in taxes. If Americans had to write a monthly check to the U.S. government or IRS, they would go ballistic over paying as much as $35 of every $100 of their earnings to those running Congress.

Equally deflating is how so many Americans regard it as a normal fact of life that they choose to hire their personal accountants or such outfits as H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt and TurboTax to avoid dealing with the hassles of trying to decipher the absurd tax code.

This, too, is a crime. Consider:

According to David Keating, a director of the National Taxpayers Foundation, the income-tax industry employs more people than are employed at the five largest Fortune 500 companies — “more than all the workers at Wal-Mart, United Parcel Service, McDonald’s, International Business Machines and Citigroup combined.”

Economist Arthur Laffer wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal that tax compliance in America costs Americans an estimated $431 billion a year. And just to put that in perspective, that’s what the annual federal deficit was under George W. Bush — back when we thought that amount was outrageous.
All of that time, talent and money wasted on tax preparation. All of that not being used on productive uses that create jobs and a higher standard of living for our heirs. This is the greatest scam of all, a monumental American tragedy.