Jonah Goldberg writes:
Congratulations! This is your last week working for the man - at least for this year. The Tax Foundation calculates that Tax Freedom Day for 2010 is April 9, which means that by Friday, Americans will have spent nearly 100 days working just to pay their taxes. If Democrats have their way, Tax Freedom Day will keep getting later and later.
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Individual liberty is far from the only concern, either. The kind of country we want to be is deeply bound up in taxation. The Tax Foundation estimates that some 60% of American families already get more from the government than they pay in taxes (and the top 10% of earners pay more than 70% of the income taxes). If all of President Obama's plans are enacted, that percentage will increase. We are heading toward being a country where instead of the people deciding how much money the government should have, the government decides how much money the people should have.
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Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., recently admitted that alleviating the “maldistribution of income in America” from the haves to the have-nots is one of the legislation's real benefits.
For a guy who is so concerned about families who “get more from the government than they pay in taxes,” Goldberg is remarkably unconcerned about corporations that get more from the government than they pay in taxes. See, Goldberg's column comes just a few days after Forbes reported that last year, General Electric “generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.” And Exxon Mobile, despite more than $30 billion in earnings, paid no federal income taxes.
Despite the fact that Exxon and G.E. celebrate “Tax Freedom Day” just moments after ringing in the new year, Goldberg didn't once mention corporate taxes in his column. Apparently, he thinks that if your tax money pays for a poor kid's school lunch, that's an infringement on your freedom -- but if it subsidizes an oil company's profits, that's all good.