According to the venerable website, Wikipedia:
Quote:
In 1900, Tax Freedom Day arrived January 22, for an effective average total tax rate of 5.9 percent of the nation's income. According to the Tax Foundation, the most important factor driving changes in Tax Freedom Day from year to year is growth in incomes, as the progressive structure of the U.S. federal tax system causes taxes as a percentage of income to rise along with inflation.”
While the Tax Foundation is correct that the growth in taxes collected is driven by income, it is
the rate or percentage of income being taxed that has most Americans groaning: "Why does government have to take so much of our hard-earned income, and then spend it so foolishly?"
If it is any comfort, the European Common Market nations take a much higher percentage of income. While America's Tax Freedom Day (when our income is finally our own) has been around April 15 for the past ten years, the ECM countries must wait until June, July, or even August to be "free."
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How does Governor Huckabee view taxation and the IRS? He spoke at an event announced several days ago on Breitbart:
Governor Huckabee Invited to Address Freedom Summit Quote:
“Set
just three days before most Americans have to file their income taxes to pay for the burgeoning federal government, our Freedom Summit will provide an excellent opportunity for the hard-working people of New Hampshire to compare and contrast the direction in which our country is headed and how their tax dollars are being spent,” AFP Foundation president Tim Phillips said in a release.
Hosts say the event,
from two conservative groups with close ties to grassroots activists, lays down an early marker in terms of who will be taking charge of 2016-related political events.
“We believe that this time around, the grassroots of the party should be the ones who lead,” Citizens United president David Bossie told Breitbart News.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government ... e-NH-EventLast night I spent quite a bit of time transcribing from YouTube, Gov. Huckabee's speech from the April 12 Freedom Summit in New Hampshire. This morning (sorry!) I could not find the link to the video to share. But here is what Governor Huckabee told the crowd:
Quote:
Mike Huckabee's New Hampshire Speech
Today our freedoms are threatened by government agencies, like the criminal enterprises formally known as the Internal Revenue Service, that operates with a heavy-handed, unbelievable power that is able to crush any citizen, any organization, and it is the one type of entity in America where you are guilty until you prove yourself not to be guilty--unlike our basic system of jurisprudence, which says that you are innocent until somebody else with a burden of proof proves beyond a reasonable doubt that you are guilty.
One of the reasons I am such a strong supporter of the Fair Tax is that because for once and for all it would rid us of the IRS, and it would make it that the entire IRS and entire government would have nothing to do with what I earn. They wouldn’t know, and it’s none of their business. Only when I spend the money should they be able to get anything from it, not when I earn it. [Applause] They shouldn’t be punishing productivity.
Our founders would be shocked if they came back today and could see what’s happened, because they never intended the federal government would get very big. They were so intent on that, that they wrote amendments to the Constitution just to make sure we got it right. And every one of the Bill of Rights did one thing: it did nothing, not one thing at all to prohibit what a citizen could do. In every one of the bills of rights it limited what the government could do. And today you’d think we are being curtailed in some way by the Bill of Rights, being told what we can do, when that was never the intent. The Bill of Rights tells the government what its restrictions are. If there was any doubt about it, the 10th Amendment was written to say: If it’s not expressly written out in the Constitution it’s not the business of the federal government; it’s the job of the states, the role of the states, the right of the states, and the federal government ought to keep their fingerprints and hands off of it.
If there’s one thing that would bring this government back to its senses, it’s devolving power out of the federal government, moving it back to the states, to the counties, to the cities where it was intended to be.
We have far more federal government than we were ever expected to have or ever believed to have needed, and the cost is staggering—seventeen and a half trillion dollars of debt, largely because we’re paying enormous amounts of money to do things that were never the federal government’s job to do in the first place. This is why devolving the power makes so much sense.
It was good to hear that Governor Huckabee still believes that the Fair Tax is a good idea, and that the crowd responded so positively to that message.