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Slavery for the government

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Slavery for the government

from JoeUser Forums

As the end of the year approaches, I decided to take a look at my schedule for the past year.  For the past 51 weeks, I've averaged working 56 hours per week. If it weren't for my summer vacation, it would have been a higher average.  Assuming that average will hold for the last week (and it will despite it being the holidays) I worked 2912 hours last year give or take an hour or two. 

If you divide that by 8, which is the number of hours a normal American works and I worked 364 work days (or in other words, I worked the equivalent of every day but Christmas).

Virtually all my income is taxed at 35% federal. My state taxes are about 4%. And everything I buy is taxed with a 6% sales tax.  I also have property taxes, gas taxes, and taxes I am largely unaware of.

All told, about 47% of what I make ends up being taken by the government in some form.

Put another way, I worked for the government 171 normal work days.  Or, until the end of August I was a slave to the government.

And yet, there are some people that argue that I should work even more for the government. That I'm not doing my "fair share".  That because I work hard and work long hours, I can thus afford to work more of those hours so that other people's family, rather than my own family, can benefit from my labor.

Nobody forces me to work. This is the retort of the left. And they're right. Nobody does force me to work. That's something they should remember. They should also consider the consequences if people like me don't work when they start demanding that I pull their weight even further.  Some of them might say that if I quit, someone else would step into my place. History has demonstrated that to not be the case.

When people demand that "the government" provide services, ask yourself this: Would you, personally, be willing to work more hours for the government for that service?  Would you be willing to work from January to September for the government to support those services?  Because when the "government" gives out goodies to individuals, they do so by confiscating the fruits of another person's labor.

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Reply #26 from JoeUser Forums Top
Man, if I worked 100 hours a week there is no way I would ever have time to post in a JoeUser comments thread. Actually that is 14 hours a day, there is no way I would even have time to eat.

Feel free to name these tricks. I always hear about these tricks from people who, naturally, just happen to not be able to use them. Since you are so certain they exist, please specificlaly name some so I can take it up with my accountant.


You can get a sense of what the tricks look like in David Cay Johnston's Perfectly Legal. There are things like the old classic headquartering your business in Bermuda, there is making your company a subsidiary of an insurance company so that your profits get insurance tax treatments. You can hide your profits in a partnership that loses money every year and then dissolves in the tenth year returning you the profit. There are several reasons no one can specifically name these for you.

1) they're tricks for a very limited audience, the very wealthy. That means they're marketed in exclusive meetings, not mass-market education efforts. Often to get Morgan Stanley or whoever to explain the details of their new tax shelter to you requires you sign nondisclosure agreements.
2) they're very complicated and unexplainable. Like they hinge on what happens when you short sell a million shares and then buy them back immediately. A lot of the time the only way they really work is that the IRS doesn't know about them. But that's sustainable because the IRS can't afford as good accountants as the people they're trying to audit.
3) some of them seem to have no real explainable logic at all. But if you have a letter accompanying your tax return saying Tax Attorney X approved this strategy, the IRS will often avoid the risk of contesting your claim. The richer you get, the more the IRS knows that it will be hearing from your lawyer and perhaps your Congressman if it leans on you. It tends to stay away.

Basically no one who doesn't use these strategies can explain them to you because there are two tax systems. People like me pay tax on our incomes. People like you pay tax on what they say their income is. It's in the deferring and nonreporting of income that these secret tax breaks lie -- it doesn't work for people whose income is already recorded on W-2's that are sent to the IRS.