{"id":26566,"date":"2017-10-07T15:36:13","date_gmt":"2017-10-07T20:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=26566"},"modified":"2017-10-07T15:36:13","modified_gmt":"2017-10-07T20:36:13","slug":"the-trouble-with-taxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=26566","title":{"rendered":"The Trouble With Taxes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Trouble With Taxes<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
Can we imagine a world without?<\/div>\n
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The U.S. Department of the Treasury building in Washington. The federal budget makes up 21.5 percent of GDP. (Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cThere is no more persistent and influential faith in the world today than the faith in government spending,\u201d wrote economist Henry Hazlitt in 1946. If that was the case then, what about today? Nearly every problem in the world calls for the government to solve it. In return for these services, the government needs money\u2014a lot of money.<\/p>\n

The federal government\u00a0of the United States alone is on track to spend\u00a0$3.65 trillion<\/a>\u00a0in the fiscal year of 2017, or 21.5 percent of\u00a0gross\u00a0domestic product.<\/p>\n

Now, the Trump administration has been in the news for proposing a reform of the tax<\/a> system, including some significant cuts. However, rather than bicker over the costs and effectiveness of that particular proposal, let\u2019s take a step back and look at the big picture on taxes. We may even consider asking the question of whether we need taxation at all.<\/p>\n

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Taxes artificially increase the risk-reward profile for any operation, regardless of profits.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In 2017, we are immersed in taxes like a fish in water. We are so used to it, we could not even imagine a life without it. But the federal\u00a0income tax<\/a>\u00a0only\u00a0started in 1913, with a relatively modest 1 percent\u00a0for the lowest bracket and 7 percent for the highest bracket. Since then, it has been fluctuating, reaching a peak of 92 percent on the highest bracket in the 1950s\u2014which nobody could afford to pay nor actually did pay\u2014and currently stands at 39.6 percent for incomes of more than $411,000.<\/p>\n

No Taxes<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are many arguments in favor of abolishing personal and corporate income taxes altogether.<\/p>\n

The first is that taxes prevent private economic activity, the core provider of employment and the products we need to sustain our lives.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Trouble With Taxes Can we imagine a world without? The U.S. Department of the Treasury building in Washington. The federal budget makes up 21.5 percent of GDP. (Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images) \u201cThere is no more persistent and influential faith in the world today than the faith in government spending,\u201d wrote economist Henry Hazlitt in 1946. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[783,16350,16349],"class_list":["post-26566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-taxes","tag-the-epoch-times","tag-valentin-schmid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26566"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26567,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26566\/revisions\/26567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}