What Do You Mean, Cut Taxes? by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #15

February 22, 2010 Mike Gold 0 Comments

While we’ve all been paying attention to really important stories like Tiger Woods’ apology and the number of medals Americans have won participating in sports we’d never watch outside of the Olympics, a couple small stories managed to slip in under the radar last week.

An Austin, Texas man with a grudge against the Internal Revenue Service slammed his small plane into an IRS office building where nearly 200 federal tax employees work, igniting a raging fire, substantial damage and two deaths – including the terrorist himself. In his wake, he left a lengthy position paper on the Internet railing against taxes and the IRS. But that’s not the whole story.

The diatribe is up there for anybody to see. So why did many media outlets edit out some if not all references to the anti-tax Tea Baggers movement? As the kiddies like to say, “jus’ askin’.”

In Moscow, Ohio (near Cincinnati), a man bulldozed his home after a bank began foreclosure proceedings and threatened to do the same to his carpet business. He said the IRS placed liens on his store and commercial property and the bank claimed his house as collateral.

There’s a lot of hostility towards the Internal Revenue Service, and that’s understandable. They take our money and we think they misspend it, pointing to a proportional handful of expenditures that were geared to get members of Congress reelected. Some are outright silly; others are legitimate but made to look silly by Republicans and Tea Baggers. Yes, there’s a difference between the two, although that will dissipate as we get closer to November.

For example, in the 2008 campaign Senator John McCain railed against a $3,000,000 request for an “overhead projector,” noting this request came from his opponent’s hometown. Of course, the funding had already been denied, and – most important – it wasn’t for an “overhead projector,” it was to replace the world-class Adler Planetarium’s Zeiss Mark VI projector that was installed in 1970. It was so obsolete that spare parts aren’t available anymore. It’s used in the education of young students from all over the nation.

But the truth doesn’t matter. The Right keeps calling it an overhead projector, and the Tea Baggers continue to cite this as an abuse that needs to be corrected.

Makes you wonder what else we waste our tax dollars on. Let’s look at where a lot of it goes. Of course, the military and their cohorts in big business gets enough each year to give old Scrooge McDuck a perpetual erection. We build roads and Interstate highways with our tax dollars. We fund education. We spend a little bit on health research. We build arenas and stadia for sports teams in the name of fostering “local” commerce – mostly franchises and vendors owned by huge conglomerates nowhere near the arenas being built at our expense.

Do the Tea Baggers want to cut all of this? Really? No military? No roads? No boarder guards?

We hardly spend anything on welfare to people, but Tea Baggers seem to prefer stepping over dead bodies than giving somebody a small helping hand for a maximum of 18 to 24 months.

Here’s a nasty little truth the shallow Tea Baggers fail to grasp: for every tax dollar some politician takes credit for cutting (Democrats and Republicans alike), there’s at least one dollar in new taxes somewhere down the line. Cut education funding on the federal level and it gets passed on to states and local school districts and property taxes go up. Cut funding for public transportation on the federal level and local districts are forced to cut back service and to raise fares. Privatize the highways and the tolls skyrocket. Cut subsidies to the postal service and the price of a stamp goes up.

There is no such thing as a real tax cut. There never has been. Taxation with representation is no more fair a system than taxation without representation, but it’s made a lot of representatives very wealthy indeed.

Comics industry fogey and

www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point,www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed the following Thursdays at 10:00 PM Eastern. Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants not unlike this one but with musical accompaniment pop up each and every live-long day at the same venue.