If you are like me, you do not like paying income tax. I
don’t like to pay sales tax, either. Or highway tax on gasoline or any of the
other taxes we have to fork over on a daily and annual basis in our lives.
But we are going broke in the U.S. We have a debt that is
eating up a huge chunk of our national budget, and sooner or later we are going
to have to dance with the devil that brung us.
We are going to have to pay it off.
And the best way in which to raise revenues in a country is
to raise taxes. I do not like it; I will
scream and complain with the best of you, but it has to be done. Let me give
you a simple example of how this works.
Let say you make $60,000 a year net. (That’s after taxes.)
That means you bring home $12,000 a month or roughly $3,000 a week. And you are spending all of it. Putting
nothing aside for a rainy day.
Now lets say you have a credit card that has maxed out at
$75,000. Don’t know how you got into
that kind of debt – don’t care. But you owe it.
And the interest rate on it is causing you to pay bills of $1,300 a
month. But that is just the interest. You haven’t paid down the bill at
all. It is still $75,000 at the start of
the next month. Now lets add your mortgage and your car note and your Macy’s
credit card to all of that and you are paying about $7,500 a month just in
interest. See the problem? You are swimming up stream.
Suddenly you have an emergency medical procedure and now you
owe an additional $25,000. You are now going backwards. That is what happened when we had our
economic meltdown in 2008-2009. Suddenly any breathing room we had as a nation
just went away.
We got no more money, honey.
Now in the real world you’d get a second job. Your wife and
kids would get work. You would try and make as much money as you could to pay
off the debts.
America has to do the same thing. We have to get more people
back to work. And we have to raise revenues from those workers and pay off our
huge national debt. We’re not going to do it all in one or two years either. It
stands at $16 trillion right now. The President says his plan can lower it by
$4 trillion in ten years. That means a decade from now we will only owe $12
trillion – and that’s if we don’t go into another war somewhere around the
globe.
So here is what all this means. President Obama or President
Romney – doesn’t matter which – he is going to have to raise taxes. On the
rich. On the middle class. Even on the poor.
Corporations are going to have to pay more. Loopholes are going to have to close and we
are going to have to slash government programs we all enjoy.
I love NPR. But it
might be better to let is become totally public supported and not have any tax
money going to it; that money should go to deficit reduction. National
endowment for the arts. The Pentagon, the Medicare/Medicaid plans. Farm
subsidies. Depletion allowances for the oil and gas industry and many more
things we love, like and cherish are all going to have to have their belts
tightened. And tightened a lot.
Sorry. That’s the way it is.
If your family owes all that much money and you are trying
to pay it off, you can’t go to the movie every night. You have to eat at home
and not dine out all the time. You might have to buy used cars instead of a new
one. It is called being smart with your
money and doing what is right.
Paying off the debt is right.
But there is a right and fair way to do that. And asking the upper 1 to 2% to carry more of
the load than they are carrying, to request that corporations using the
infrastructure of America all pay up a little more, there is nothing wrong with
that. And don’t be surprised if Congress
and the President (whichever one is in the White House) asks you in the middle
class to pony up some more, too.
I hate to start your weekend on such a downer, but let’s get
real. We owe $16 Trillion dollars. We all ran up that number together. We’re
all going to have to pay it down together, as well.
Did I mention I hated paying taxes. But I know I’ve got to.
Visit my new website at www.johncrawleybooks.com
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