Let’s assume that Keynesian economics works. Let’s assume that government needs to spend tons and tons of money in order to bring out economy back. Let’s ignore the empirical data and base our assumptions on what really amounted to a clever marketing scheme perpetrated upon us by the top brass in the Federal government and Lord Keynes himself.
Accepting the premise that the Federal government needs to spend means that they will have to shore up tax revenues. After all, they cannot keep on borrowing money and printing money in order to demolish the Great Recession (or is it the Great Depression 2.0?). Doing so means they will have to start taxing more.
But there’s a problem with taxation. You essentially are biting the hand that feeds you when you do if you do it too much. You need to do it just enough so that you raise the revenues you need without the risk of demolishing the golden goose. So what should we tax that would pretty much guarantee huge amounts of revenue with little risk?
Really quite simple when you think about: tax the poor more. Here are some of the reasons why:
- The American poor tend to spend just as much money as the middle class on most things, despite their difference in income levels. That means that if we were to raise taxes on the poor, they would lose their ability to show off their stuff and they might reduce their lifestyles to something that Americans can take pity on.
- The American poor tend to be obese, more so than the middle class and rich. By taxing them more, you’ll get slimmer poor people since they will not have enough money to buy both junk food and the hippest cell phones.
- The American working poor do not have any interest in getting their fellow welfare poor to work. This will incentivize them to ensure that the welfare moochers are pushed into working again and becoming productive members of society, thus increasing tax revenues.
- When you raise taxes on the rich, they tend to leave. This is because the rich have enough money to move where ever they want to. The poor are, by contrast, unable to move and thus won’t have to be chased down with expensive court proceedings and jail.
- By counting welfare as taxable income, you can ensure that the poor do not just simply mooch but also give back to the government to fund the police, firefighters, and public schools.
- By lowering taxes on the rich, they can hire more poor people who want to work and those people will increase tax revenues when you withhold it from them.
- The poor tend to not itemize their deductions, so the refunds they receive on income taxes will be much less than the rich.
- By reversing the progressive income tax and making the poor pay more percentage-wise than the rich, you incentivize them to make more money and thus work harder. By working harder, they produce more and thus this country’s wealth can only grow.
- The cool thing is, most poor people are gullible enough to believe that the rich will be behind this scheme and that the government is just an innocent tool. You can absolve yourself of the sin by claiming that it must be the rich who are doing this because why would a weak-willed politician such as yourself do it.
These are just some of the many benefits of taxing the poor more. It is a potential and untapped goldmine in America because the truth of the matter is most people envy the lifestyles of our poor. If we are able to pull this off, the Federal government could be out of debt in the years to come.
But no one would have the guts to do this. So instead of taxing the poor directly via withholding, let’s just set up National taxes on alcohol and tobacco products and let’s establish a national lottery system. I hear many states do this stuff as well. Also, we should legalize marijuana so that we can raise tax revenues as well because if we aren’t able to send money to the people we want, we will be unable to be re-elected.
(In all seriousness, I’ve just killed any chance I have of ever running for office higher than School Board member)