Good Read On Brootz Today

Nealz News The Georgia Public Policy Foundation steered me to a rather interesting (though not shocking) facts on taxation in America. The source is an article by Michael K. Evans posted on IndustryWeek.com. Do you have any idea just how huge your total tax load is? Take a look at these facts. First -- and this fact is now beyond debate -- all taxes are paid by individuals. All taxes are levied against wealth, and only individuals hold wealth. For those of you who attended government schools, and are thus a little slow on concepts like this, corporations are not wealthy. Corporate shareholders hold that wealth. Individuals. So ... for the sake of Evan's article, he says that the taxes are paid by employees or proprietors, the owners of small businesses. Now .. the tab: * Total federal income taxes collected last year: $932 billion. That works out to $6,650 per employee. * In addition to income taxes, the federal government collected another $1.286 trillion in taxes, mostly Social Security taxes. * The total state and local tax burden amounts to $1.14 trillion. * The grand sum here -- paid by employees and proprietors -- is $3.358 trillion. That's $3,358,000,000,000.00 * This works out to $24,000 per employee. * The total compensation earned by employees and individual proprietors last year was $8.2 trillion. * This means that 40% of income goes to taxes of some sort. * That rate, of course, is much higher for those earning higher incomes. Much lower for those in low income brackets. * Nice, huh? Now ... grab this fact. Where did most of this money go? National defense? Homeland security? Hardly. In terms of Federal expenditures you have: * $495 billion for national defense. * $272 billion spent by the federal government for the purchase of goods and payment of employees * $1.69 trillion sent to someone else. $1.69 trillion in income redistribution. This is just fine with those on the left who believe that income is distributed, not earned. For the rest of us? Well, I don't know about you, but I have a wee bit of a problem with all of this. The main job of our federal government is protecting our borders from invasion yet $1.69 trillion of our tax money is spent on welfare and only $495 billion for defense. Nice, very nice.