I hate the income tax.  It’s an intrusive and demoralizing experience filing them every year.  Why does the federal government get to know about every transaction I’ve made over the course of a fiscal year?

It’s also expensive.  I work exceptionally hard so that I can attempt to enjoy a decent quality of life.  That’s only gotten harder with inflation.  As I prepared my income taxes this year, I found that, even though I earned less from lessons during FY2024 than FY2023, I somehow owed more money—by a factor of three.

When I first wrote this post, I argued for a national sales tax as the lesser of two evils.  Now, I’m tariffs all the way, baby.  They act, in a sense, as a national sales tax, but they have the social benefit of bringing jobs and industries back to the United States.  I’d rather pay an extra fifty bucks for my American-made washing machine and give a fellow citizen a good job than have to shell out my meager savings and reveal all of my financial underwear to the IRS every April.

At least with Trump in office, there is a faint hope—very faint, but a hope nonetheless—that the income tax might be reaching the end of its abusive, wicked life.  What a terrible system!

With that, here is 11 April 2024’s “TBT^256: End the Income Tax“:

Read More »

It’s that time of year again, when yours portly yells impotently at the clouds and demands the end of the income tax.  Unlike prior years, yours portly actually got his taxes done relatively early (if you count early March as “relatively early”), and while I owed both Uncle Sam and the Great State of South Carolina a pound of flesh, I ended up getting away with only paying $54 total—woooooot!

Still, the annual ritual of telling the federal government how many miles I drove to music lessons and what I paid for WordPress is an odious and obnoxious reminder that the federal government dominates our lives and our personal information.  I recognize that taxes are a necessary evil, but let’s focus on the “evil” part of that equation.

I don’t know what the solution is, and I think the Republican Party has spent far too much time quibbling over the placement of commas in the tax code instead of fighting the necessary cultural battles in our nation, but tax reform should be a no-brainer.  Here’s the Portly Proposal:

• Tax all income at 10%
• Don’t tax interest earnings in savings accounts

That’s it!  Easy.  Cheap.  Everyone pays the same percentage.  Maybe—maybe!—have a carveout for people who earn, say, less than $20,000 a year—they pay, say, 5%, or even just 1%.  If people want to withhold from their paycheck, fine.  But there are no surprises—if you earn $2000 in March, you withhold $200.  At filing time, all that would be done is confirming you’ve paid your amount; if you overpaid on that first $20,000, then you’d get a refund.

Even that is more involved than I’d like, but it gives a bit of relief to the working poor.  Otherwise, no deductions, no carveouts, nothing.  There’s still an incentive to save, since no one pays for interest earned on savings accounts.

Yeah, yeah—you want to write off your $300,000 mortgage.  No.  Sorry—let’s not incentivize people to borrow huge amounts of money so they can save forty bucks on their taxes.

With that, here is 13 April 2023’s “TBT^16: End the Income Tax“:

Read More »