The election on Tuesday was an example of what Alexander Tyler was warning us about. While the pundits gushed about the high voter turnout among the young and first-time voters, they failed to mention the high voter turnout among those who have never paid a dime in income tax. Youth is a great time to chase girls and drink beer, but those kids know absolutely nothing about what it takes to make a living, pay their bills and save. Many of them go to college for free. Those voters that don’t pay income tax are naturally going to vote for those candidates who promise them more of our tax dollars. Notice how taxpayers usually have one or two children and welfare mothers have five or six. They say they have a “right’ to have as many children as they want and I guess I am lucky to have the “right” to help pay for them.
The voters said they wanted change, yet the change was never defined. Obama says he will give 95 percent of Americans a tax break. Then he promised to spend billions of dollars on new social programs. Go to the IRS Web site and look at the income distribution of taxpayers in this country. You cannot give 95 percent a tax break and tax the other 5 percent enough to make up the difference plus produce billions of new tax dollars. Very few people in the U.S. make $500,000 per year. Median income is between $30,000 and $40,000, depending on the state.
Several letters in the forum lately have been from an individual at Phoebe who probably makes $500,000 per year bemoaning the fact that everyone does not make that kind of money. Those types of attitudes led to the $25 an hour janitorial jobs at unionized plants. Fifty years of that led to the massive closing of those same plants and the inability of U.S. companies to compete with rest of the world. We manufacture very little in this country anymore; we just sell each other hamburgers and overpriced real estate backed by risky mortgages. Another 25 years and the U.S. will at best be a Second World nation. The Chinese and Japanese already own us, they just have not called in the debt. Yet.
A sobering thought for everyone, by 2050 it will take 100 percent of federal revenues to pay Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That should make those that hate the military very happy, but I am not so sure it will make us safe. Remember, Alexander Tyler warned us that the average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. We are at 232 and sinking fast.
Donald K. Pollock of Albany is a certified public accountant.
