MurraySabrin.com

The revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has been giving extra careful review of the tax- exempt applications of Tea Party groups and other “patriotic” organizations should raise the obvious question, doesn’t an income tax lead to all kinds of abuses?

In a free society there would be no income tax, no IRS, no tax exempt applications, no need to spend huge sums of money each year hoping to get the political elites to reduce their power over the economy and the American people’s income and wealth. In addition, the federal government would be limited, so subsidies, corporate welfare, foreign aid, etc., would also be abolished.  Since the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, in 1913, authorizing the federal government to levy an income tax on the American people, the income tax has become not only a mechanism to create a multi trillion welfare-warfare state but it is also been used for political purposes to “scrutinize” closely groups critical of the federal government.

According to Reuters, the “director of exempt organizations for the IRS, apologized for what she called the ‘inappropriate’ targeting of conservative groups for closer scrutiny, something the agency had long denied. The director’s apology is hollow. The fact the American people have created and continue to create hundreds of organizations to educate and rally the public against the federal government’s overreaching economic power speaks volumes about how far our nation has drifted into widespread statism.

The income tax, which initially exempted 98% of the American people with rates ranging from 1% to 7%, has become a tool of redistribution and social engineering, and an encroachment of free speech. Moreover, the country prospered without a federal income tax for more than 100 years; during the Civil War when President Lincoln got the Congress to pass temporarily an excise tax—effectively and income tax.

We do not need an income tax to pay for so-called government services, most of which is about robbing Peter to pay Paul.  In fact, the American people would be better off without having to fill out the 1040 and other forms and maintaining all the records necessary to comply with the tax code.  The income tax is a huge “deadweight” on the economy.  A national sales tax would not solve the problem either.

Although income tax rates are down from the obscene rates of the 1970s, they have been creeping up for upper income Americans, and income taxes paid by the American people will continue to increase as more and more deductions are either eliminated or capped in coming years.

The only honorable solution to the tax-exempt organization application fiasco and the continued assault on the American people’s income and wealth and the unsustainable welfare-warfare state is to abolish the income tax lock stock and barrel; and the sooner the better.