(Freedom.news) Americans are well aware of the dark period in our early history when, for far too long, far too many of our forebears tolerated slavery. But a new kind of enslavement exists today, and far too many of us appear to be tolerant of it, too.
It’s called high taxation, and it has been utilized as a tool of enslavement, not a little ironically, by our first African-American president.
Under the Obama administration, the federal government has been collecting record taxes, even as we suffered through a major recession and as a large plurality of Americans have either left or been tossed out of the workforce (also a record number).
As reported by CNSNews.com on Friday, the U.S. Treasury raked in a record amount of tax money totaling nearly $1.5 trillion through Feb. 29. But here’s the really alarming part: Despite this record haul in the first five months of the fiscal year, the federal government nevertheless spent about $353 billion more than it took in.
In February alone, the Treasury ran a deficit of $192,614,000,000, the news site reported, adding:
The record five-month tax haul of $1,248,371,000,000 equaled approximately $8,263 for each of the 151,074,000 people in the country who had either a full or part-time job in February.
It gets worse.
“The record taxes in the first five months of this fiscal year exceed by about $63,263,220,000 in constant 2016 dollars the then-record $1,185,107,780,000 in tax revenues (in constant 2016 dollars) that the Treasury took in during the first five months of fiscal 2015,” CNSNews.com reported.
“However, even while taking in a record $1,248,371,000,000 in tax revenues from October through February, the Treasury was spending $1,601,375,000,000, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement. Thus, so far this fiscal year, the Treasury has run a deficit of $353,005,000,000.”
The biggest source of revenue during the first five months of Fiscal Year 2016 was the individual income tax, bringing the Treasury about $597.5 billion. The second-largest take was Social Security and other payroll taxes, about $428 billion.
It’s clear that today’s level of taxation is at a point our founding fathers would have found intolerable – which is why they did not include a federal income tax in the original Constitution.
“Except for a brief period during the Civil War, the federal income tax was not a part of America’s governmental system for some 125 years. That’s because our American ancestors understood that if the federal government had the authority to tax incomes, the American people would not be free,” writes Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation. “They understood that a free society necessarily entails the right of people to keep everything they earn without fear that the government can seize any portion of it.”
“Moreover, our American ancestors rejected the welfare-warfare state that the income tax funds,” he continued. “That is what it once meant to be an American. That is what it once meant to be free. That is what it once meant to be exceptional.”
“I’m for paying some taxes,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and an early GOP presidential contender said after introducing his tax plan last year. “But if we tax you at 100 percent then you’ve got zero percent liberty. If we tax you at 50 percent you are half slave, half free. I frankly would like to see you a little freer and a little more money remaining in your communities so you can create jobs. It’s a debate we need to have.”
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