Hands off my dough!
Ken Odor
Apr 29, 2008

April is the month when all curmudgeonly old conservatives whip out their time honored diatribe against taxes.

Not that we (I count myself among them) disagree with the reality that governments need to collect money to provide the services their citizens demand, but some of us find fault with the manner in which they are collected.

Nothing new under the sun here either.

But it’s worth bringing up in this day of runaway federal spending and calls for new money for the state during troubling economic times.

At least with local personal property taxes one gets a bill that has to be paid by a certain date.

However younger folks and those who have never been self-employed seem to think of the federal and state income tax as savings plans, designed to provide them with a big refund check each spring that they can spend on things they need.

Where in reality the amount of the refund is an interest-free loan to the government courtesy of the taxpayers.

Money that could have been earning interest for those who earned it rather than the government, had they invested the same amount.

Worse still is the almost universal feeling that one’s net pay is what one has actually earned, rather than the gross.

All those deductions for federal, state, Social Security and Medicare are treated as though they never even belonged to the person who earned them!
But for business people, whether sole proprietors or giant corporations, taxes are a different matter.

Say you have a small business. As a sole proprietor, you pay quarterly.

You write a check to Uncle Sam, and you cover your Social Security too.

Every single taxpayer in the country would have to do the same thing if the withholding and payroll taxes were abolished. 

If individuals had to sit down and write out those checks, there would be a groundswell of grumpiness that could not but help but hold down the growth of government.

If folks truly realized how much they were paying, they would be more inclined to cast a skeptical eye on each and every proposal coming out of Richmond and Washington to spend new money. That’s the way it should be.

Will withholding ever be done away with?

I wouldn’t bet my income tax refund check on it.

But at least citizens should look at those check stubs each payday and note how much money went straight to government, and think long and hard about whether they are getting their money’s worth.

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