47% of Americans pay no federal income taxes and I would speculate a great many, who work off the books, also pay no FICA taxes either. Yet everyone, including I suspect, many non-citizens get to vote for national representatives who turn around and vote for laws that perpetuate these inequities. (Motor-voter laws, lax voter registration processes … taken advantage by “community organizers” such as ACORN, and the rapid growth of absentee ballot usage are making a mockery of traditional voter-fraud checks.) Thus, we have turned the slogan of the original tea-partiers on its head … now a growing number of people in this country are enjoying “representation without taxation.”
Even in local elections, many who pay absolutely no property taxes get to vote. All colleges and other non-profits nevertheless get to elect their community officials. (In Wellesley, MA, Wellesley College professors and administrators who live in rent-free and property-tax-free housing … and who send their children to local schools … still get to vote for their local candidates. And the colleges and other non-profits themselves enjoy fire/police protection and other community services without having to pay the taxes or, too often, the “fees-in-lieu-of-taxes” needed to pay for these services.) And even more egregiously, students at these institutions of higher learning now get to vote for town administrators where they go to school as opposed to where they (or their parents) actually pay taxes – even though many might also absentee-vote back at “home” too. Such up-side-down logic seems to me to be gross miscarriage of the tenants of our democracy.
“Don’t tread on me,” has unfortunately become “Everyone, who wants to, tread on me.”
When I owned a cottage on Peaks Island Maine, it was noted that people who rent houses could vote to raise property taxes but the non-resident property owners had no vote. That got particularly weird when the renter-voters were deciding to secede from the city of Portland and possibly the state of Maine. And as a property owner, I had no vote. For the renters, that’s representation without taxation but for me it would have been taxation by whatever realm my property ended up in. I suppose some British ‘landowners’ in the colonies felt that way in 1776…
ReplyDeleteMore to the point, what happens when 51% of the people pay no taxes and then vote as a block.? Do they vote to tax the bejeesus out of the 49%? Or do they vote to abolish taxes, thus killing the golden goose?
This also touches on another hot button. All the noise about raising taxes is about current earnings. If you made a huge amount of money, say US$500M as a Wall Street plunderer, and invested offshore or placed it domestically in CDs, bonds, and real estate, you could realize a very low income yet have huge wealth. They used to call it 'land poor.' You could own thousands of acres and yet qualify for food stamps.
It’s the current workers who have to carry the burden, and IMHO, that should 39% >300K, 50% > 1 million, and no ceiling on employee contributions to Medicare and Medicaid contributions.
Try instituting a wealth tax and watch for a real revolution!!
-- Saint George
Let he who is without sin cast the first...absentee ballot. I'm not sure how you fix this inequity. I guess a good start would be to tighten-up on voter registration criteria and identification at the polls. I would abolish absentee ballots altogether. If you can't show up at the polls, sorry no vote for you. I would also insist on a minimum reading comprehension test for voters. BTW, Conservatives seem to be terrified that immigrants will pull elections for the Dems, but recent pools show that many Hispanics are not much interested in politics.
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