Your Opinion: Taxation feeds insatiable beast

Dear Editor:

I applaud Mr. Ochsner's LTTE of July 8 with its central point "government under both parties, has grown, costs more, and takes more of our personal resources," and will continue until we as a nation ... "make some very difficult decisions about the size and scope of government services."

However, I disagree with his sentence "there simply isn't enough money to do all the things they (government at all levels) want to do." Sure there is. Tax Freedom Day is the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough money to pay off its total tax bill for the year. Tax Freedom Day for 2012 was April 17.

However our federal government is borrowing 40 cents for every dollar it spends. So if taxes were raised enough to pay off the full cost for this year, the correct Freedom Day would be May 14. At six a.m. that glorious Monday morning we could all breathe a sigh of relief knowing that for the past 20 weeks we had been doing what our leaders in Washington D.C. asked; work harder and pay more taxes.

Of course I am joking. The average working individual pays more in taxes than for food, clothing and housing combined. And we wonder why our lives are so frustrating and rushed? Because two days of every week we spend feeding an 800-pound gorilla that in return haunts us miserable with regulations, rules and mandates which interfere with our daily lives, offend our sensibilities, distract us from our interests and goodwill, and generally seek to diminish our families and our spiritual heritage.

To top it off, huge chunks of the taxes we pay are used to fund social "safety net" programs which have generally been proven counterproductive and harmful to the recipients. Yet we straggle on.

If we don't change course, on January 2013 we will face a whole new Taxmageddon, $494 billion worth of new taxes according to the Heritage Foundation - $471 billion from expiration of the Bush tax cuts and $23 billion new taxes from Obama-care.

I recently finished reading Mark Levin's Ameritopia, and he's convinced me I don't want to fund somebody else's Utopia. The 800-pound gorilla needs to be caged and forced on a diet to weigh less than 400 pounds. My preference would be a Tax Freedom Day no later than Feb. 1 each year.