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“Taxation Is Theft” Mantra Ignores Real Republican Robbery of Workers for Rich

In a holiday Facebook chat, my crazy cousin Aaron says, 'Taxation is theft!" I respond that taxation is our expression of true Rousseauian liberty (living under rules that we prescribe to ourselves) to provide public goods to sustain civil society and invite my cousin to emigrate to a land where he won't have to participate in any such system, like Antarctica.

In a civil society, it's not taxation that is theft; it is the refusal to pay taxes while enjoying all the benefits of roads, schools, and police and fire departments. It is also the rigging of state budgets to cut pensions for middle-class workers to fund tax cuts for the rich, as practiced by Republican governors Sam Brownback of Kansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey. These cuts were rank redistributions of wealth (theft, in my cousin's language) which produced no public goods:

Both Brownback and Christie promoted their tax cuts as instruments to boost economic growth. Yet, a recent review of federal data by the Kansas City Star found Kansas “trails most other states when it comes to job growth.” Likewise, an investigative series by Gannett newspapers recently found “New Jersey’s job growth rate [is] the second worst in the nation. … New Jersey’s middle class has lost billions in income through layoffs, salary cuts and wage freezes [and] more than 100,000 job seekers have been unemployed for months on end.”

South Dakota's Republican leaders have practiced a similar theft, handing subsidies and tax breaks to all sorts of corporations while chronically throttling investments in schools and roads. There's some hope that Governor Daugaard is realizing we can no longer shirk our duty to pay for road repairs, but his only noteworthy proposal on education so far, the Build Dakota vo-tech scholarship, seems to continue the process of redistributing wealth from taxpayers to subsidize businesses that don't want to pay their own way with competitive wages. And there is no sign the Governor or the Legislature have any desire to use our stockpiled wealth to stop stealing talent from teachers as we pay them the lowest wages in the nation.

Taxation is not theft. Theft is mooching public goods without paying one's fair share of taxes. And theft is not paying the wages that workers deserve for the value they add.

7 Comments

  1. jerry 2014.12.28

    Not to badmouth your family tree Cory, but it would appear that your cousin is much like the rest of the right wing, they cannot read. Republican tea party dudes and dudettes have distanced themselves form Brownback as you note, but they still cannot read the bottom of a ledger sheet to grasp its meaning. This statement of theft is really a stretch, but should give him a couple of seconds of fame with his ignorance.

  2. jerry 2014.12.28

    The only thing I can think of that describes the current situation in South Dakota is this, a system of social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political party.

  3. bearcreekbat 2014.12.28

    Cory, I think your analysis in this thread is right on the money (pun intended). It reminds me of the commentator who complained because he had to pay taxes to fund the schools, but had no children in school. Someone correctly reminded him that when he was growing up he had attended public schools paid for by other taxpayers, and now it is his turn to ante up.

    People who pay income taxes in particular should be proud that they can make or have enough income and earnings to contribute to the society they live in. Too many people have too little income to pay any income taxes. They are the ones who should be complaining, not those who are fully able to pay their share of taxes.

  4. Les 2014.12.28

    I've always been happy to pay income, sales, futa, SD unemployment ins, withholding, booze n bed, ........ Death taxes, tax everything we've worked 24/7 for, paid tax numerous times on and you call that the same way as you call your cuz, Cory. Not to worry. All party colors have created ways to avoid that tax. Just a thought to get yous fumed up this Sunday...

  5. Roger Elgersma 2014.12.28

    Twenty years ago I had a subscription to Inc. magazine, which is a magazine for small business. Their definition of small business back then was less than ten million sales per year. Sounds big for South Dakota but nationally that is small business.
    So every year they had a list of the five hundred fastest growing businesses. We did have Gateway so we were on the map. But it had a little one paragraph inset story. It said that South Dakota, Mississippi and Alabama were consistently in the bottom five in taxes and were always in the bottom five states for number of fastest growing businesses. Like my Dad always said, 'if you do not invest a nickel you will not make a dime.
    Dad attended a one room country school in South Dakota. His father was an immigrant who rented land so he paid no land tax and the other two school board members were retired land owners with no kids or grandkids. So all the votes on purchases for the school were two to one. When WWII broke out the children asked the teacher where that was. She pulled down her newest map of Europe which had a country called Prussia. She drew a line through it and said, 'this half attacked the other half when Germany attacked Poland. So Dad only got through eighth grade. When we grew up in Minnesota two of the three kids got PhDs and a foster kid was the first black to work in the head office in the biggest bank in Mississippi. And I have three college degrees. If you do not invest in education here, your kids will work hard and your grandkids will get educated and do well somewhere else.

  6. Roger Elgersma 2014.12.28

    Jesus said, 'give to Ceasar what is Ceasars.' He did not say that you are getting robbed.

  7. jerry 2014.12.30

    Wow, check out this great news! Here is the good that taxpayer money goes for, saving lives. Cut back on squandering defense monies and utilize that for the people and their needs.

    http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/facts/blog/2014/12/open-enrollment-week-six.html

    Those are astounding numbers for the health and well being of citizens who would not have been able to have access to a basic human need, healthcare. Healthcare is not only for the privileged, it is a human right for all.

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