Taxes are inevitable, but not fatal disease
Death and taxes may indeed be inevitable, but they are not synonymous, as some politicians would have you believe. We get no benefit from death, save relief from life. Taxes, on the other hand, have returns.
The property taxes we pay to our school districts support the education of our children. Our municipal taxes are used to repair local roads on which we drive and clear them of ice and snow, to maintain playgrounds, community buildings and for many other purposes; our county taxes go to parks, bridges, our courts and jail. Prisons, state universities, highways, appeals courts and help for the poor and infirm would be impossible to maintain without taxes paid to Pennsylvania.
And our federal tax dollars, among many other things, pay for the defense of our nation, the support and care of the elderly and disabled, and safety of consumers and travelers.
A common misconception is Americans are taxed to death, but in fact, by world standards, we are taxed lightly for the benefits we receive.
If it is true presidential candidate Donald Trump paid no federal income tax for as many as the past 18 years, it could well be, as columnist David Brooks wrote in Wednesday’s edition, he has done nothing illegal. He has simply taken advantage of provisions in the tax code that particularly benefit corporations and the wealthy.
According to tax returns obtained by The New York Times, Trump claimed a business loss of $916 million in 1995 and would have been able to apply that loss to his personal income over many years. We don’t know if he actually did this because he has refused to make his tax returns public.
We do know Bill and Hillary Clinton have also taken advantage of provisions in the tax code to avoid paying federal taxes at the highest rate of 39.6 percent. The Clintons earned $10,745,378 in 2015, mostly from book sales and speaking fees, and paid $3,624,455 in federal income tax at a rate of 34.2 percent, reducing their taxable income with deductions like business expenses and charitable contributions.
Ordinary citizens – a couple filing taxes jointly with an annual income of less that $151,200 – pay federal taxes at lower rates, between 10 and 25 percent. But they don’t qualify for the loopholes that the rich do. If you were out of work for a year and ran up debt on your credit cards, you would owe nothing in federal taxes for that year. But if you found work the next year, you would have to pay taxes on what you earned, regardless of how much you owed to the credit-card companies.
This is not unfair. What sort of life would we have without the services of our federal government?
Yes, as in all systems, there is fraud and abuse, and there can be unbelievable waste. And consider the hundreds of billions of dollars poured into the wars in the Middle East. But to say, as Trump did in the recent debate that any taxes he might have paid would have been wasted, is an insult to everyone in military uniform and to tens of thousands of federal employees: air traffic controllers, meat inspectors, overworked doctors and nurses at Veterans Administration hospitals, mine safety inspectors and national park rangers, just to name a few.
As citizens, we should always be vigilant in observing how our tax dollars – local state and federal – are being spent. If we are complacent, abuse will flourish. We want to help the needy, not enrich the greedy. But taxes are not a disease that must be eradicated. They are, like them or not, the lifeblood of community.