The Gun At Peter's Head

You're probably gonna get really mad at me for writing this. Odds are you've clicked over here briefly while drinking your coffee first thing in the morning or scraping the last bits of yogurt out of the plastic bell at noon. Whatever the circumstance, you are probably just as tired as I am of the persistent reminders of tax time.

If I see one more ad for H&R Block's Rapid Refund I'm going to hurt somebody. With pain. It grates that they don't make more of the fact that this is actually an interest-bearing loan they're trying to sell you. Easy money for them, because they know the government will pay out, and they've got nothing to lose. At some point, in other words, these staid tax preparers became the white-collar equivalent of loan sharks, but it's dressed up in the cloak of that most American virtue--impatience. Why wait for 10 to 16 days for your refund when you can walk out of here today?

Better yet, why let the government siphon money from your paycheck in a flurry of meaningless numbers, month after month in the year before hand? In the great irony that is the American way of looking at things everyone seems quite upset that Uncle Sam may overhear him talking to his mother in Shelbyville, but at the same time is completely inured to having thousands of dollars automatically taken from his wages by said mountebank. (Don't you just love that word "mountebank"? It's disappeared...just like "blackguard" and "libertine"...although I was called a libertine earlier by TV on the Fritz.)

There are many of us libertarians (which is what I believe TV meant to call me) who have developed the quite-sound theory of the Tax Bill. I thought of it again as I transferred all the numbers from my W-2s to the tax prep software's corresponding windows. Every time I get a paycheck throughout the year, I know how much it is going to be, and I know what bills it's going to cover. I've been getting "real paychecks"--as opposed to the wads of cash common to my babysitting years, waitstaff and strippers--for most of my adult life. Every two weeks you see how much you get to take home, and it's only when you do your taxes that you fully comprehend the magnitude of the amounts of money siphoned away by the giant sucking hose of bureaucracy.

It's a LOT of money. In my case this last year it was enough to pay our entire mortgage for nine months. But we don't miss it because we really never had it.

What's the theory? Simple. If instead of being taken out of your check before you get paid, your taxes were a due-bill presented to you in the same way as the utilities and cable you'd probably demand more for your money and give up the money less willingly. Taxation would cease to be this remote, faceless beast and become instead something with which you were on more intimate terms. If taxes were something we had to pay every month at the kitchen table, frowning over the check register and the little windowed envelopes, we'd scream a little more. "I'm writing this check for $519.00 so that somebody can build a sweet potato museum in East PorkHaven?!" would perhaps drive home reality even harder.

In truth, I think maybe this is why so many libertarians are self-employed. They already pay their own taxes. Four times a year, no less.

This afternoon's speech by President Bush has further incited me to beg for this change to the status quo. It isn't the job of the Federal Government to "take care of the elderly and the poor". That's the job of the individual and the non-profit organisations formed by coalitions of the like-minded and like-willed. Continued acquiescence to forced taxation has led our government to appoint itself the sole (re)distributor of wealth and the prime arbiter of need. We've allowed the Federal Government to take more money than it needs, to continue to spend that money frivolously and to assume the role of our collective soul of compassion. How dare we be mad at the loss of our freedoms when we care not one iota about the loss of our responsibilities?

Let us at least start by being able to remit our tax payments freely.