Victor Davis Hanson
Too many wealthy citizens only pay capital gains taxes at a reduced rate rather than income tax on their annual revenues. And too many of the one percent have the wherewithal to pay no tax, given the labyrinth of loopholes and deductions their brilliant but costly accountants mine. Yet, they are not the only culprits on the revenue side of our $35 trillion national debt.
The U.S. should also start cracking down on the untaxed, black market, which in California alone can range up to several billions of dollars per year well aside from illegal income from prostitution to drug sales to fenced goods.
Millions of Americans work for cash—and will not work if not paid in cash. When recently repairing my house, one of the most infuriating demands from electricians, plumbers, and carpenters was the insidious insistence to be paid in off-the-books cash. But why should Americans who pay up to half their incomes in various taxes and fees, simply exempt others from the same obligations? Can we tell our employers to pay us in cash the way contractors demand that of us?
Within a ten-mile radius of my home, one can buy almost anything without paying sales taxes (and the vendors rarely pay income tax) from flowers and refreshments to shovels and bicycles, whether at swap meets, farmers’ markets, roadside canteens, or corner vendors.
One unspoken reality permeates these black markets and untaxed and illegal economies: at least in California the majority seem dominated by immigrants, who seemingly feel that they should be exempt from IRS or State Franchise Board scrutiny. When arguing with them, their attitudes’ subtexts reflect that the DEI/Woke ideology has permeated our tax code.
Apparently, the premise is something like the following: the vendor who sells you a meal, who hawks flowers on the corner, who somehow has a new mattress to sell at a swap meet, who volunteers to insulate your attic for cash-only wages, who shows up in your driveway eager to fence a (likely stolen) pressure washer, all of them believe they belong to the poor, down-trodden, oppressed/victimized class, and you the targeted payer must oblige with your income halved by taxes, given you belong to the oppressor/victimizer class and so always pay taxes while millions feel that the government agrees they should not.
But the real key to solvency and a return to balanced budgets is reining in spending—especially non-productive government spending, which is almost a pleonasm.
What do the woke/DEI/green/cultural-social justice government auditors produce? Is there ever a cost-to-benefit analysis of the effects of the administrative state on the dying citizen? Or, rather, what does it cost both in implementation and reduced efficiency? How many artillery shells is the Pentagon short because a vast bureaucracy must approve every promotion to adjudicate whether the candidate qualifies, or is to be aided or punished in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation? Why has the California high-speed rail project not laid any track, one decade and nearly $20 billion after its inauguration?
Do we grasp that historically the more forms, regulations, and watchdog government regulators, the more wasteful the producer, who either spends precious time and labor in compliance to pay for the auditors or in disgust ignores the entire bureaucratic oversight and joins the black-market economy?
There is some disconnect, as illiberal and politically incorrect as it is to say, that at our local warehouse food market, the parking lot is full of late-model cars and especially the crew-cab, huge V-8, luxury-loaded $80,000 new pickups, while inside at the market line one waits needlessly as the shopper pulls out a wallet full of valid, invalid, maxed-out, fake, or family member EBT/WIC cards, under various names, even as one waits while the “food” is separated from the second pile of cash-paid canned dog food, beer, wine, and teeth whiteners—while the shopper then sometimes pays for lottery tickets and cigarettes with additional cash payments. This is the civilian counterpart to the $400,000 jet pilot helmet, only it offers no advantage to national defense.
The screwed American is the $60,000-a-year-income earner, who suffers governments to deduct taxes from his check, who pays for all goods and services with checks or credit cards, and who has no EBT, Medi-Cal, or WIC card—and who owes $103,000 for his share of the national debt.
I think he is the target of Joe Biden’s snarly, sourpuss rant “Pay your fair share!”
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