"Who pays the business tax anyway? We do! You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes. And if they can’t be passed on to the customer in the price of the product as a cost of operation, business goes out of business. Now what they’re going to do is make it easier for demagogic politicians–and you’ve got plenty of them in the state legislature–to say to the people, look, we need money for this worthwhile project but we’re not going to tax you, we’re going to tax business, now that we can do it by a one vote margin. So they’ll tax business and the price of the product will go up and the people will blame the storekeeper for the rise in the price of the product, not recognizing that all he’s doing is passing on to them a hidden sales tax.
If people need any more concrete explanation of this, start with the staff of life, a loaf of bread. The simplest thing; the poorest man must have it. Well, there are 151 taxes now in the price of a loaf of bread–it accounts for more than half the of a loaf of bread. It begins with the first tax, on the farmer that raised the wheat. Any simpleton can understand that if that farmer cannot get enough money for his wheat, to pay the property tax on his farm, he can’t be a farmer. He loses his farm. And so it is with the fellow who pays a driver’s license and a gasoline tax to drive the truckload of wheat to the mill, the miller who has to pay everything from social security tax, business license, everything else. He has to make his living over and above those costs. So they all wind up in that loaf of bread. Now an egg isn’t far behind and nobody had to make that. There’s a hundred taxes in an egg by the time it gets to market and you know the chicken didn’t put them there!"
Ronald Reagan
8 comments:
Racist!!!
sniff sniff...
This author says exactly what I feel but am unable to express like she does...Dang I wish I could write.
Letter: Obama, like Reagan, can transform America
He was a diplomat, not a warrior. He also said he did not know when life began. He wanted government to stay out of our private lives. He was thoughtful, not temperamental. He wanted to expand the middle class. He transformed the way we think about government when we needed to - and we need to again.
We must think differently about government and the future. As a member of the justified "angry middle," I see a corrupted justice department, attack on individual privacy and habeas corpus and see our loss of morality and use of torture. I see our loss of foreign policy/strategy and now just preemptive unilateral striking and invasion of countries that did not threaten us - something that we abhor when Russia does it to Georgia. I see cronyism and corporatism with CEO salaries 400 times the average worker, companies running our government. I see a shrinking middle class that capitalism depends on.
Agnes Francis
Laurel
Gosh I miss Reagan....really.
But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife. And the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Robert Kennedy, University of Kansas. 3/18/68
I think everyone agrees on the idea that things can be better. Children shouldn't have to go sick and hungry. The elderly shouldn't have to die alone in a shelter. Veterans shouldn't have to wonder where they will live when they return home from war. These are problems.
The difference between us lies in the ideology of the solution. Some people think the job of the government is to care for its people. Some think its the job of the people to care for themselves.
The government exists to provide a framework in which a free people can thrive. It does not exist to provide FOR the free people. The government should not be tending our crops and tying our shoes. It exists to ensure that we have the right to do so as we see fit for ourselves.
I couldn't agree with you more, Shawn.
Love it!
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