Taxation without effective representation

It will come as no surprise, to those who have been following my jottings, that I profoundly believe that we are over taxed and under represented by those we elect to the White House and Congress.

I have written several times about the inequities that occur as a result of the lobbying by factions having a particular axe to grind. You name any group and I can almost guarantee that a good portion of their efforts go to protecting their interests even though it may be to the detriment of the nation as a whole.

Nor is this idea of territory protection and promotion solely the domain of the lobbyists. The political parties and individuals therein seeking offices at all levels fail to place the good of the Nation above party or self-interests. Self-serving pronouncements are made on the election campaign trail willy -nilly without any basis of probable success. An example was the promise made recently in Florida at a gathering near Cape Canaveral.

“By the end of my second term we will have a colony on the moon” was made to an area decimated by the current administrations’ decision to end the manned spaceflight programs of NASA. Of course this had appeal to the local populace who were no longer working at the Kennedy Space Center.

Politicians of whatever persuasion fail to grasp that promises made cannot be kept without a means of paying for them and the continuous search for more means of income through taxation is not the answer.

When I was a young newlywed my wife and I decided that we would establish a budget for ourselves. At the start of each month we would distribute our income into envelops for each monthly expense plus an envelope for savings and one for unexpected needs. As individuals it worked for us and kept us from deficit financing. Now I would not expect the government to use envelops but the principle is there.

We, as a nation, have been careening out of fiscal control since the Revenue Act of 1913. That act was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on Oct. 3, 1913. It consisted of 14 pages which has become an almost indecipherable document of over 9000 pages.

We hear a lot of static now about how those whose income is derived from other than wages are not paying their fair share. Until the enactment of the 16^th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913, taxes on dividends, interest and rents had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

How did we survive for the first 100 plus years and now 100 years later some proclaim that a tax rate of 15% on at least some of that income is inadequate?

Let me remind you that in the first taxable year after the passing of the Revenue Act of 1913 the tax rate for a couple whose income exceeded $4,000 was 1% and that less than 1% of the population paid income taxes.

The tax rate only kicked in when the income exceeded $4,000. If a taxpayer then had an income of $20,000 the equivalent income in the devalued dollar of today would be in excess of $350,000.

In closing, you may recall that I wrote about the fiasco with the government giving millions to a company called Solyndra. A similar event has shown up with the $118 million dollar stimulus grant presented to Ener 1 who supposedly was going to make electric car batteries. They are now in bankruptcy also.

VERITAS.

Bayne’s column appears every Sunday. He is an author and historian. He lives in Culpeper. Email: walking.h.farm@hughes.net