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Blog
Tax Day
Washington, D.C.,
April 15, 2019
If you’re anything like me, today is a frustrating reminder of the burden of government. It’s tax day. The good news is that you likely paid fewer federal taxes this past year than you did the year prior. That’s thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. It isn't impossible that a few may have seen a small increase, but I’m amazed at the number of people who argue their taxes have been raised because their recent refund checks seem smaller. Just so we’re all on the same page, the relevant figure here is NET take-home pay. This is the sum of all your paychecks PLUS your refund. (Or more accurately, the total amount that government didn’t confiscate from you plus the total amount you loaned the government interest free). Assuming your income and benefits were static between 2017 and 2018, chances are your NET take-home pay was greater as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Yet, according to polls, only 20% of Americans are certain this is the case. Why is that? Well, according to the New York Times, not exactly a Republican rag, the discrepancy can be explained by “a sustained — and misleading — effort by liberal opponents of the [tax cuts] to brand it as a broad middle-class tax increase.” In other words, Democrats and their surrogates repeated the lie on every channel and in ever paper that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was just an empty name. They said it so often, and with such vigor, that people started believing it. Even by the slippery standards of today’s political debate, no greater lie has been perpetrated on the American people over the past few years than the anti-tax bill crusade. Propaganda, plain and simple. Now, Democrats and Republicans have long disagreed about whether (and which) Americans SHOULD pay more or less in taxes. But we have rarely, if ever, debated what people actually pay. Until now. If you would like to know how 21st century political propaganda is made, I suggest you take a look at the article below: |