Introduction
Any entity which can exercise control over our finances and our health, have at its disposal the means of absolute control over the individual and thus the society as a whole. We will leave the subject of our health for another time. Our intent in this article is to address the control exercised over us through the use of the tax laws.
Please remember, here at “Who’s That Candidate”, we view all of our topics through the foundational principle of individual liberty. This is the singular principle upon which our country was founded. All of the Civil Liberties which we enjoy and which our Constitution was written to safeguard, extend from this single core principle. While it is an important consideration, the first priority of “Who’s That Candidate”, when writing about solutions, is not to make things safe, our solutions focus on protecting the sacred principle of Individual Liberty.
Now, the title of this article is TAX Freedom and we would like to start by saying, The idea we are about to propose will sound very counterintuitive at first glance, but if you will take the time to think through what we propose, we believe you will understand the solution we propose.
First is, Corporations do not really pay taxes. And there is no way to get them to pay taxes without ultimately causing them to go out of business. Most Corporations, but not all, pay out most of their revenue in overhead, wages, bonuses, and shareholder dividends. Very little cash is left in an account as net profit. The money that is left in an “account” that can be taxed, is normally to be used for future capital expenditures. In other words, future building projects and business development. As hard as it seems for some people to understand, corporations are not individual persons that are getting rich. Now, we understand that this is an extremely simplistic treatment of the subject, but we contend that it is, on the whole, an accurate assessment of the general subject. All overhead in business is passed downstream and taxes are part of overhead. The only people that really and truly pay taxes are the workers (blue-collar, white-collar, and Executives), Shareholders, which pay income tax, and consumers in the form of sales tax. As we said before, there is no real way to get Corporations to actually pay taxes unless you can figure out a way to keep them from incorporating taxes into their cost of doing business. Good luck with that. So then the real question is, why do we tax them at all?
We also mentioned property taxes. We don’t really believe there is much that needs to be said on this subject. If you believe you own your property, stop paying taxes on it and see who really owns it. To say you really own something you must have absolute control over its possession. The government is in that position, not you. Property taxes leave the property owner in an extremely vulnerable, submissive, and coercible position, to the government. It is one thing to place your property in a position as collateral by choice and a completely different thing if it is being placed in a position of collateral for the purposes of coercion, by a government, to make you act in a manner it deems appropriate.
We said all of that to set up our idea that we are going to ask you to support. And it is this. We want you to support wiping out the complexity of our state income and property tax system and turning to a total end-user consumption tax system for the State of Kentucky. We also want you to advocate, through your vote, to exempt businesses from paying any and all taxes, including sales taxes when purchasing equipment or inventory for their businesses. So there will no longer be a section in the new code that allows a write-off for “entertainment” for golf and corporate “business trips” to the Bahamas. And for those businesses that are pass-through Corporations and Sole Proprietorships, it will greatly reduce the ability to hide personal income, because there will be no write-offs for anybody. There will be no write-offs period. Yet at the same time, it will give these individuals a higher income. They will now pay taxes based on their consumption choices. We believe history has shown that while there have been some abuses when Corporate tax levels have been reduced, they use the money for the purposes of business reinvestment. This has also historically caused new jobs to be created and wages to rise. And since we use tax liability reductions or tax exemption as a tool to attract new companies to our state already, our legislators already know that they don’t truly tax businesses. What it actually does do, when we give these exemptions, is increase the tax base through the above-mentioned actual taxpayers when new jobs are created.
Our state’s tax codes are a complicated mess. And everybody that wants to abuse it, needs it to be complicated. The more weeds there are, the easier it is to hide amongst them. The more complex the codes are, the more leverage politicians have for self-enrichment. Our tax codes and regulatory bodies “CREATE” the Lobbyists who enrich our “Representatives”. As a side note, in the near future, we will talk about regulatory bodies and how they are used to also enrich our government officials.
We recognize that making businesses tax-exempt is a radical departure from even most plans that deal with consumption, end-user, and sales tax plans. Most of the problems that arise in these plans are on the business tax end and are the predominant reason some call for a flat tax instead. Our approach eliminates these problems and greatly decreases the ability of politicians to manipulate the codes for personal gain. What it does do for us, is take a huge amount of government intrusion out of our lives. And it places the control of our taxes into our hands based on our consumption choices.
Last, for those who argue that it might not be revenue-neutral. And? I’m pretty sure we can all agree that if our state government will quit spending money on crap it shouldn’t be spending money on, we won’t need as much money. But that is only if we concede that it won’t be revenue-neutral. We do not concede this point at all. It is our belief that it will increase tax revenue while spreading the pain more equitably across everyone. We would really like to reduce the amount of money they have to work with, by getting rid of several of their programs.
Now we would like for you to honestly ask yourself how attractive Kentucky would be to companies if we simply do not tax them. Are we so desperate to make sure they are taxed, that we will cause ourselves to be less free from the government? There is no way you can prove businesses pay taxes right now. And for the few exceedingly rare instances such as Facebook and Microsoft, that have massive cash reserves which they can’t possibly spend on their businesses, is it worth the negatives that our present tax system brings into politics? When it comes to business, our tax code is just a massive money shuffle. Here at “Who’s That Candidate” we prefer freedom. Just think about it.
