Income tax day, a day late

Did you pay your taxes yesterday, if not earlier? Good. You should pay them. Fines and jail time aren't worth the protest.

Still, we should remember that income taxes are flat out immoral. They are legal theft, period and full stop. That's why they were unconstitutional to begin with. Few people realize that the original Constitution decreed that there would be no 'head tax', that is, no tax levied on a person simply to levy it on him so that government could get cash. That's why they had to change the Constitution through the 16th Amendment to allow it. The Supreme Court had ruled that income taxes violated the original document.

The framers intent has been one more time destroyed through a government who knows better than you what to do with your cash. Rest well in that hubris, America.

More Chicken Little

The sky is falling! The Mayan doomsday prophecy was correct after all, only it was a few days short. On January 1st, there will be hellfire and brimstone. We won't survive it. That's the day we fall off the fiscal cliff, from which we shall never recover.

But is that really all that likely to happen? Will there be a personal and national Armageddon in the United States?

It's doubtful, really. The fiscal cliff tales of woe seem to be manufactured frenzy more than a serious threat to our health and well being. Think about it for a moment: how often in our lives have we heard gloom and doom, only to wake up the next morning to face a new day the same as always?

Quite often, when you come to think of it. Usually, in fact. This is a new madness, and that's all. The media drives the panic. The very same media which calls the frantic gun buying since Sandy Hook acts of lunacy. They need to take a look in the mirror and draw a deep breath.

This is not to say that the automatic budget cuts and tax increases are not threats to our persons and our economy. They are in the long run, particularly the tax cuts which are set to expire. But has anyone taken a second to think about the big picture? Has anybody asked whether or not the new Congress in January might, just might, mind you, be able to do something about it? So what if the Bush tax cuts expire? Can't taxes be cut later on? Can't spending be re-instituted if necessary on January 3rd?

Call us pie in the sky if you like, but we are, have been, and always will be, skeptical of doomsday scenarios. They tend not to play out. We expect that they won't play out in this instance either.

Take a pill, breathe into a paper bag, do whatever you wish to calm yourself. The high temperature on January 1, 2013 will not be 1800 degrees. Being as we're in Detroit, they may not even making freezing.

Tea Partiers: Mere Knee Jerks?

As we, ahem, celebrate Tax Day today, there are those who take greater pleasure (of sorts) in the revelry than most. They are the Tea Partiers, the widespread yet rather uncoordinated mass of people who are protesting too much government taxing and spending. Today is, quite naturally, a prime time for them to call attention to their concerns.

It would be easy to call the entire movement knee jerk, and there is perhaps good reason for believing as much. There are without doubt many folks on all sides of the political spectrum who simply call certain things wrong merely because they oppose them on general principle rather than exact detail. Such movements may safely be summed up by Groucho's famous line: "Whatever it is, I'm against it". It may be shallow rationale, but is it always all that pig headed?

Not if general principle is on their side. Government spending is not usually very efficient. In fact, it is notoriously inefficient. The great economist Milton Friedman summed that up quite well with his famous quip about spending other people's money on other people. In short, where there's no real vested interest in sound spending we tend to get unsound spending. The only real way to quell that is to cut off the source of cash. In the case of government, this means taxes.

Those who dismiss the tea party folks as missing the boat, as even mislabeling their cause (after all, it is our elected representatives who have imposed the taxes at issue) miss the point themselves. Though an important right to have taxation with representation, that in and of itself is not the catch all be all. The taxes imposed in and of themselves must still be reasonable and proper to their aims as well as to the proper role of government.

So if many in the Tea Party factions are little more than knee jerk, so what? They are better than the knee jerks of the left. Even if only by happy accident, they stand on firmer ground.