Tax Season: The Forced Idolatry of Corruption

I’m writing this at Eastertime, so Happy Easter to all of you. The Resurrection of our Lord is the cornerstone of our Christian faith. It is also the time of renewal, when the birds return from the south, and the plants and flowers bloom gloriously. The weather warms up, and the miracle of life is on display everywhere.

But it’s also a time when we are reminded, with a figurative blow to the head, that we must submit to the tyrants who misrule us at every level. If you don’t file your taxes, the IRS may be coming for you. You know, the agency that Trump talked about abolishing last year. Right around the same time he suggested that we may not need any more taxes. Right about the time he proposed that no one making less than $250,000 pay taxes. I liked that Trumpenstein a lot better than the delirious warmonger we have now. Trump promised to get rid of taxes on tips. And overtime. And important from my perspective, on Social Security. Thanks to “anti-tax” legend Ronald Reagan, the elderly began paying taxes on their Social Security payments in the 1980s, if they had more than a token amount of other income. Of course, this was the definition of a double tax, since those monthly payments are simply returning in increments your money that was involuntarily withheld from you as an employee.

I wasn’t really surprised to find that Trump had lied bigly about how his new $6,000 deduction for those over 65, amounted to the same thing as eliminating Social Security taxes. Which he promised to do. Of course, that didn’t prove to be the case. Our additional $12,000 in deductions had virtually no impact on our statement at all. I still owed taxes on about 85% of my Social Security income. Overall, we paid about $200 less than last year. Before the big and beautiful tax deduction for oldsters. That’s the way the rotten system always works- it never benefits the people. It’s a render onto Caesar thing, you wouldn’t understand. And the tax preparer asked us if we had any tips or overtime income. Hmm. I thought it was reported that Trumpenstein actually did eliminate taxes on those. So why did they ask us that, then? I hated the process of filing taxes even when I used to get a refund. It’s unbearable when you know you’re going to be paying. As if the taxes paid all year weren’t already more than enough.

We go to one of the local stations where AARP volunteers do your taxes for free. So at least I’m not paying hundreds of dollars to H & R Block to learn that I owe even more to this worthless government. The place was full of oldsters, with the walkers, oxygen tubes, canes, and unnecessary masks front and center. We sat near a far too chatty woman who was loudly sharing her own slew of maladies with all those around her. She wanted everyone to know just which type of diabetes she had. Apparently she takes care of her mother, who must be very, very old. We were asked to produce the exact same IDs three times; to the receptionist, the person who did our taxes, and the person who fact checked the return. I don’t even question this lunacy any more, but it’s an advertisement to any critical thinkers who may still exist that those representing this collapsing Banana Republic in any way, shape, or form are unquestioning automatons. They just love to ask for your ID. Unless you’re voting.

It was a grueling three and a half hours. I was forced to observe my American peers, and that is never a pleasant experience. I saw nothing but vacant placidity in their eyes. Their main preoccupation seemed to be keeping track of their many medications. And their regular doctor appointments. Maybe bragging about their grandkids. There was no room in there for questioning the senseless ordeal we were all forced to go through, to unjustifiably honor the corruption and incompetence, let alone protest anything else. How could there be a “balance owed?” Owed for what exactly? The potholes that litter every road? The ancient power grids with the Chinese sensors? Medicare, which pays you back in increments the money stolen from you over a working lifetime, and charges you an ever increasing monthly fee to do so? While only giving you 80% medical coverage, forcing you to buy supplemental insurance? Our corrupt intelligence agencies and Military Industrial Complex?

As you can see from the photo above, Trump asked the House to abolish the income tax. At some point. Don’t know what happened to that. Consider that the Republicans, historically renowned as the Stupid Party, control both the House and Senate. And the White House. And have a majority on the Supreme Court. But these “anti-tax” advocates clearly had no desire to bring this to a vote. Trump had the same luxury of controlling both houses of Congress during the first two years of Trump 1.0. And they did absolutely nothing. Now the new, Snidely Whiplash-version of Trumpenstein has a meaningless war to fight. A really expensive meaningless war. It looks like we’re headed for boots on the ground. American boots. The Israelis have already told him that we’re on our own in protecting their interests. They’re busy with things like passing a law legalizing the hanging of Palestinians. Pushup Pete Hegseth responds by quoting the bloodiest sections of the Old Testament. No time to end taxes.

We don’t even know what our tax dollars pay for. People I trust have claimed that withholding taxes go exclusively to paying the interest on the national debt, and not to any services. Well, that would be about what you’d expect from these incomparably awful leaders. How do we pay down a debt that was created out of nothing? As I’ve said a million times, the national debt should be repudiated. It isn’t our debt. We didn’t sign off on any of it. But I seem to be the only one saying that. Perhaps if we had a true socialist system like France, whereby the citizens do get real services in return for their taxes, I might feel a little better. Not that I’m advocating socialism. But we have what I call socialism without services in this country. We are taxed at a cradle to grave rate, yet receive virtually nothing in return. An embarrassing, crumbling infrastructure. Out of control police that the Supreme Court has ruled are under no obligation to “protect” us. A bloated bureaucracy full of fraud and waste.

Our Founders fought a war for independence over meager taxes on stamps and tea. They angrily objected to taxation without representation. Just what do we have now, other than taxation without representation? Our taxes don’t pay for any meaningful government function. We only saw a small glimpse of what they do fund in those tantalizingly brief DOGE revelations. Like over 6,000 journalists all across the world, who promulgate official state lies via a massive expansion of Operation Mockingbird. Or footing the bill for vacuous celebrities to meet and embrace the penis-piano playing former comedian running Ukraine. I’m sure what will now be $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon will be well spent. No chicanery there. How many other examples of localized corruption are there, like the Somalian daycare center fraud? By the way, who has been punished for that? Is Tim Walz still governor? If only Trumpenstein would treat his political foes like he treats Iran. Call them fucking bastards.

Besides the involuntary withholding tax, we are still forced to pay property taxes. Why are we compelled to keep paying taxes on homes and cars which we’ve already purchased? The Republicans, whose primary issue is always “low taxes,” never mention this. The only taxes they are concerned with are corporate taxes, estate taxes, capital gains taxes, and slashing the highest tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. That’s who they really “represent.” Well, and Israel, of course. When you pay so many different taxes, you should have a right to know what your money is being spent on. DOGE was a fledgling attempt to do just that. If you recall the reaction, the entire Left objected to you knowing where your tax dollars are going. Most of the Right wasn’t exactly thrilled with it, either. Theoretically, there should a digital ledger somewhere, listing assets and expenses. Like we see on our own bank statements. You’d be laughed out of any group conversation for even suggesting such a thing.

Why do I have to pay a “self-employment” tax? I am contracted by publishers, and by the newspaper American Free Press. Why does anyone pay this tax? Doesn’t it discourage that “entrepreneurship” that every Republican holds dear? Well, have you ever heard any Republican proposing that we eliminate it? Wouldn’t that be beneficial to those “small businesses” that the Republicans claim to adore? You know, the ones destroyed forever in the unconstitutional COVID lockdown. The lockdown that happened under the leadership of Trumpenstein. Why do the Democrats regularly propose new bond initiatives, to finance parks, schools, and the like? Isn’t there money in the budget already for that? Again, where does our money really go? If only DOGE had been permitted to audit the Pentagon, and the CIA, and FEMA, and the Federal Reserve, among others. We can only guess at the shenanigans that would have been revealed. But we can be confident that there is incomprehensible fraud.

It has been reported that, in my county, we are paying some $3.7 million in salaries to public school board staff members. A “staff director” was secretly added, with a salary of $121,535. I guess doing that publicly would be some kind of “threat to democracy.” The Board of Supervisors all make six figures, with the chairman closing in on $150,000. And yet we can’t get the pot holes fixed here. More importantly, we can’t seem to vote these petty tyrants out. The school board is still dominated by devotees of Drag Queen Story Hour and Critical Race Theory. Vote local- it still doesn’t count. I’m sure the situation is similar everywhere else. We are also footing the bill for the exorbitant pensions of government workers, including the really lucrative ones for retired police captains and fire chiefs. That would be the same group of taxpayers who work for companies that almost never offer any pension now. Just Social Security. Which is still being taxed, no matter what Trump says. And is headed for insolvency.

The older I get, the more radical I become. I wrote Survival of the Richest in an attempt to awaken the masses to the extent of the screwing they’re getting. It hasn’t sold that well. The Left has no use for it, because I don’t hate myself for being White and demonstrated clearly how immigration has been disastrous for working class wages and benefits. The Right couldn’t distinguish it from Das Kapital. The 80 percent that are losing in our casino economy just don’t understand that nothing will change until the ones who are winning- especially the top tier of the One Percent- are finally subject to the “sacrifice” they continually ask the peasants for. However, whenever I start pontificating on the subject, I meet strong resistance. Not from the One Percenters. I don’t know any. But from the poor and working class that would benefit from any fair redistribution of wealth. They just sneer, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch!” Kind of like how deluded “Woke” Whites babble on about “White Supremacy.”

Ever since Ronald Reagan “reformed” the tax code in the 1980s, things have just gotten worse for the commoners. The legislation that is credited to him eliminated deductions for health costs, charities, credit cards, car loans, all debt except for home mortgages. Please never forget that Reagan’s “tax cuts” consisted of cutting the rate for the wealthiest Americans from 70 percent to 28 percent. That’s a huge “reform.” No wonder they named an airport after him. And to accentuate the “fairness” of what he was trying to accomplish, Reagan raised the rate for the lowest income Americans from 13 to 15 percent. Where did all that missing revenue go? Reagan also raised Social Security taxes. Five times. In terms of record vs. rhetoric, Reagan is the closest thing we’ve had to Trumpenstein. When America was at its economic and cultural peak, in the 1950s, the top tax rate was 90 percent. Did things run better then? Every job paid a living wage. Most people had private pensions. How did we afford that?

I would really like to unplug from this monstrosity of a system. Stop filing taxes. Everyone should. But how many are like me, increasingly dependent upon those monthly Social Security checks? How can we withdraw from a system, when we need that income? Which is, after all, our money, that is still being withheld involuntarily from every worker, under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “temporary” WWII-era measure. The tax code has been critiqued as being needlessly complex for decades now. How many politicians have advocated changing it to something so simple that you could fill it out on a postcard? It hasn’t been made less complicated. It just gets more complicated. And more inconsistent and unfair. A national sales tax was suggested. A value added tax. No one’s doing anything now, except lying about “big and beautiful” broken promises. Gavin Newsom is blocking some kind of tax on billionaires. How could such a thing ever pass, when billionaires control every politician?

America didn’t have an income tax until 1861, when Abraham Lincoln (who else?) instituted one. That ended in 1872, but in 1913, with the passage of the 16th Amendment, Americans were saddled with a permanent tax on income. So how did our government run until 1913? What funded our national defense, infrastructure, government salaries, etc.? Good question. Trump’s point about tariffs was accurate, in a sense, because tariffs did largely fund a much, much smaller government prior to 1913. There was no need for a social safety net, since family dysfunction was very rare, and churches were relied upon to help the poor. We can’t go back to that, because nearly every family has tremendous dysfunction now, along with an alarming rate of mental illness, exacerbated by the vaccine-fueled explosion in autism rates. You can’t go home again, as Thomas Wolfe reminded us. But you can keep paying taxes. Tribute to those who least deserve it, and do nothing good with the money extorted from you.

https://donaldjeffries.substack.com/p/tax-season-the-forced-idolatry-of