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Taxes

"When enough people come forward to ask—indeed, to demand—that government limit itself to the powers it is given in the Constitution, thereby freeing individuals, families, and communities to solve their own problems, we will know we are on the right track."

That is why I'm a candidate -- to give people the opportunity, by electing me, to say they demand that government limit itself to the powers it is given in the Constitution.

Sharon sent me the following question.

Q. Are you in favor of abolishing COMPLETELY the income tax in favor of a sales tax?

A. I am in favor of abolishing the income tax completely and not replacing it with any other tax. The income tax is not needed to run the legitimate Constitutional functions of the federal government. Instead it's being used for social engineering, income re-distribution and funding partisan political agendas, i.e., pork.

Walter Williams, the John M. Olin distinguished Professor of Economics and chairman of the economics department at George Mason University has said that "the purpose of law is to prevent one person from violating another person's right to acquire, keep and dispose of property in any manner so long as he doesn't violate another's simultaneously held rights. Today, our government has become increasingly destructive of the ends it was created to serve. Americans have become increasingly hostile and alien to the liberties envisioned by the framers."

He goes on to say in his article on social justice in the July/98 Freeman that "Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution enumerates the functions of the federal government and gives it taxing authority to carry out these functions. For the most part these functions relate to national defense, federal courts, copyrights and patents, coining money, borrowing, and a few other activities. With even a cursory reading of the Constitution, one cannot find any authority for Congress to confiscate the property of one American and give it to another. Yet this activity now constitutes over two-thirds of federal expenditures that will top $1.7 trillion dollars in 1998. Expenditures that have that characteristic include Social Security, food stamps, farm subsidies, business bailouts and subsidies, disaster insurance, and expenditures by the departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Commerce, and Education. These government activities and many others have been justified in the name of promoting social justice. In the pursuit of social justice, personal liberty has become a secondary or tertiary matter."

Thus, the Constitution is quite clear as to what the true role of the Federal government should be. But we have a problem of 100 years of people believing in the myth that through the state, "everyone can live at the expense of everyone else," as Frederic Bastiat said. In the 1999 Cato Institute Handbook for Congress in Chapter 3, Congress, the Courts and the Constitution, it states:

"For either Congress or the Court [Supreme] to be able to do fully what should be done, therefore, a proper foundation must first be laid. In essence, the climate of opinion must be such that a sufficiently large portion of the American public stands behind the changes that are undertaken. When enough people come forward to ask—indeed, to demand—that government limit itself to the powers it is given in the Constitution, thereby freeing individuals, families, and communities to solve their own problems, we will know we are on the right track."

That is why I'm a candidate -- to give people the opportunity, by electing me, to say they demand that government limit itself to the powers it is given in the Constitution.

Right now Americans are embracing $1.8 trillion of Federal spending. That's $7,200 for every man, woman and child in the United States. It's going to take some time to wean ourselves off of that kind of "fix." Tax credits could be an interim step in the weaning process. Also, as Cato Institute points out in their Handbook, Congress should:

I agree with Walter Williams that "liberty is fragil. Our liberties are under siege because most Americans are ignorant about our Constitution and its philosophical underpinnings. Thus, we fall easy prey to political charlatans and quacks all too ready to exploit this ignorance in their quest for power and to satisfy popular visions of social justice."

Q. May I question your position on multiple taxation? I have for a long time had a problem with the idea that I pay close to 27% of my wages in taxes and then another 5% to 11% to spend it, depending on the item. Examples are the gas taxes, phone service connectivity tax, etc.

Best regards, Chris - Gahanna, OH

A. Yes, it's true that you're paying taxes on spending your money on those items. In addition it's estimated that we are also paying an additional 10% of our entire Gross Domestic Product, i.e., the value of all goods and services produced in the United States, on regulations.

I agree with the assessment made by the Cato Institute in the Handbook for Congress that "the original rationale for the U.S. Department of Transportation was to build the interstate highway system. That was a legitimate federal function, since all U.S. citizens benefit from a coordinated network of interstate highways. But the interstate highway system was completed 15 years ago. The vast majority of DOT funding is now spent on noninterstate highways, local roads, and urban transit systems. It makes no sense to collect the federal gasoline tax, send it to Washington, D.C., pass it through a federal bureaucratic maze of 65,000 workers at DOT, and then send it back to the states where the funds originated."

Cato goes on to say that "in transportation policy, the federal government has become a costly and meddlesome middleman. Until 1996 states were forced to comply with a federal 55 mile an hour speed limit in order to get back their gas tax revenues from Washington. It was the federal government that mandated air bags. Federal highway funds come with other strings attached that inflate construction costs: the Davis-Bacon Act (requiring union wages on federal highway projects), minority set-aside programs, and buy-America provis-ions. Those add about 30 percent to the cost of federal construction projects and thus contribute to the decay of America’s public infrastructure. Moreover, increasingly Congress uses the DOT budget as a pot of money to deliver pork-barrel projects that states would rarely fund if they were spending their taxpayers’ own money."

Finally, "All of this inefficiency and redundancy could be ended by closing down the DOT and repealing the 18.4 cent per gallon federal gasoline tax. States could then raise the gas tax themselves (as much as they wished) to pay for whatever road building and repair were needed. Eliminating the cost of the federal bureaucracy in Washington would cause construction and maintenance costs for highways, bridges, and transit systems to fall."

Federal highway spending is federal pork barrelling at its worst and the Republicans and Democrats both participate in it.