How They Make It Disappearby
Vin Suprynowicz April 15 is not “tax day.” It’s “tax filing” day. It’s not a new observation that, if this were a day when Americans were required to hand over in one lump sum a personal income tax applied to their wages and other gains of the previous calendar year, some form of revolution would not be far behind. The stroke of genius that keeps the whole operation afloat, despite a combined tax rate much higher than that which got the people of France “up in arms” in 1789, or our own ancestors in 1776, is called the “withholding tax.” The “withholding” levy – initially at a rate of 20 percent – was instituted in July of 1943. Before World War Two, individuals who owed a federal tax paid during the following year in quarterly installments, reports economist Robert Higgs, editor of the quarterly journal of The Independent Institute. “In those days relatively few people paid income taxes,” Mr. Higgs writes. “As late as 1939 fewer than four million individual returns were filed, and the filers’ total tax bill came to less than $1 billion, or less than 4 percent of their net taxable income.” When so few people paid income taxes and the amounts were so small, the system of deferred payment worked fine. Beginning in 1940, though, as the government began to mobilize for participation in a gigantic global war, its revenue demands grew enormously. “Federal spending burgeoned from $9 billion in fiscal year 1940 to more than $98 billion in fiscal year 1945. Although the greater part of this spending upsurge was financed by borrowing, huge increases in tax collections also took place,” Mr. Higgs notes. “In 1945, 50 million individual income-tax returns were filed, and the filers owed more than $19 billion, or almost 20 times the amount that Americans had coughed up for this tax just five years earlier.” Milton Friedman was an economist at the Treasury during the early part of the war. In his 1998 memoirs, “Two Lucky People,” he observed: “It was clear to all of us at the Treasury, as we set out to multiply the amount of revenue to be collected from the personal income tax, that it would be impossible to do so unless we could develop a system to collect the taxes as the income was earned, not a year later.” The resulting system – employer withholding – has remained in effect continuously ever since 1943, even though the war that prompted its creation ended more than 62 years ago. And that system’s perpetuation has contributed greatly to nourishing the postwar Leviathan state. At this point, the federal government spends $25,100 per year per U.S. household, according to Brian Riedl at the Heritage Institute. $21,600 of that is financed through tax collections, while the remaining $3,500 per year is simply borrowed. Let’s stipulate for the purposes of argument that the $5,200 per household spent on “defense” is fully justified, as is the $935 per household spent on federal employee pensions, the $742 spent on veterans’ benefits, the $455 spent on highways and “mass transit,” the $396 spent on “justice administration,” and the $298 per year per household spent on “international affairs.” That still leaves $8,668 per household per year spent on Social Security and Medicare; $3,752 spent on other “antipoverty programs” including Medicaid and food stamps; $692 on health research and regulation; $578 on government schooling (that’s just the federal 9 percent share), and $305 on “natural resources and the environment.” What that last list of five allocation categories have in common is that not a penny of that spending is authorized under the Constitution. Charity is a wonderful thing, but not when it’s made mandatory on penalty of imprisonment, and certainly not when the armed goons seizing the money from our paychecks to do these “good works” have no authorization for them. Please don’t give me the tired old “general welfare” stuff. James Madison, who wrote the Constitution, made it clear in his “Report of 1800” that “Money cannot be applied to the General Welfare, otherwise than by an application of it to some PARTICULAR measure conducive to the General Welfare. Whenever, therefore, money has been raised by the general Authority, and is to be applied to a particular measure, a question arises whether the particular measure be within the enumerated authorities vested in Congress. If it be, the money requisite for it may be applied to it; if it be not, no such application can be made.” Jefferson heartily agreed that if the Congress could spend money on anything a majority held that day to be “for the general welfare,” there would have been no point in listing their enumerated powers; we would then have an unrestricted “general government” no different from that of the tyrant Bonaparte. “Our tenet ever was …” Jefferson wrote to Albert Gallatin on June 16, 1817, “that Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were to those specifically enumerated; and that, as it was never meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action; consequently, that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for which they may raise money.” In other words, if you can’t find an enumeration in Article I Section 8 – right there next to the powers to build a Navy and coin money – of a specific congressional power to administer or pay the citizens’ old-age pensions, to pay their medical bills or buy them Fluffernutters or school their children or muck around with the price of peanuts, then you are plumb out of luck. Zero out just those five forbidden spending categories – note that we haven’t even gotten to farm subsidies, the Department of Energy, or NASA – and we can deduct $13,995 per household in federal tax “needs.” Do that and you get an instant bonus – since revenues now vastly outpace expenditures there’s no longer need to borrow money by issuing any more “treasury bills,” and we could soon also start to reduce the $2,090 per household currently spent merely paying interest on the fedgov’s $5.4 trillion to $9.6 trillion in debt. (The higher figure drops toward the lower if you stop pretending they’re ever going to “pay back” the mythical “Social Security Trust Fund.”) Either way, we’ve just cut federal spending in half, by eliminating just five major spending categories, none of which is authorized by the Constitution. Any new president could do this with a stroke of the pen, reminding the other branches “I just swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, not to spend all the money you guys can figure out how to loot with a tax which you won’t even identify as either ‘direct’ or ‘indirect,’ giving us some hint as to how it can be legally collected.” As Charlotte Twight notes in her 2002 book, “Dependent on D.C.,” “Withholding is the paramount administrative mechanism that since 1943 has enabled the federal government to collect, without significant protest, sufficient private resources to fund a vastly expanded welfare state.” The Treasury itself acknowledges, in a fact sheet on the history of the U.S. tax system posted at its Web site, that wartime withholding not only “greatly eased the collection of the tax,” but “also greatly reduced the taxpayer’s awareness of the amount of tax being collected, i.e. it reduced the transparency of the tax, which made it easier to raise taxes in the future.” Maybe that helps explain why, in 2005, more than 130 million individual income-tax forms were filed, yielding the federal government $1,108 billion in revenue, with $787 billion (71 percent) of that amount already having been “painlessly” deducted from wage-earners who never saw it, through the “miracle” of the withholding tax, devised with the help of that great champion of personal liberty, Milton Friedman. We gave them the money; they promptly found “needs” and “demands” which they assure us we are barely covering.
Then – as long as you’re going that far – re-set “tax day” from April to the first Monday in November, allowing voters to go to the polls freshly reminded of all those things for which they wish to give their elected office-holders their heartfelt thanks. April 23, 2008 Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Copyright © 2008 Vin Suprynowicz
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