In spite of the fact that Obama and the liberals are forever talking about redistributing the wealth, they are really talking about redistributing income. This redistribution process is supposedly brought about by our progressive system of taxes. Whether or not you are in favor of income redistribution, you/we don’t have a choice, do we? My question to you taxpayers is are you willingly or unwillingly getting your money’s worth from big brother’s government’s efforts to take from those that produce and give to those who don’t or can’t produce? Any thinking taxpayer; i.e., conservative taxpayer, intuitively knows that the answer is no.
Everyone is probably aware that in this recession ( I don’t care what the government and the economist say, we are still in a recession.) about 50% of the people pay no Federal income tax. In non-recession times that figure is more like 35 or 40 percent. That doesn’t seem “fair” but that’s the way it is. But, nobody escapes paying state and local taxes. According to this article, the average American pays a whooping 57.7% percent of their income in taxes, some of which are hidden taxes.
But, the question was how is the redistribution workingout? Let’s think of one group of programs that we collectively call welfare. It’s been reported in various news outlets that in this non-recession recession, there are now 44 million people receiving welfare payments. That’s a lot of people who are benefiting from the redistribution process. Apart from whether or not welfare is a good idea from a sociological stand point, I’m more interested today in who is really benefiting from our tax dollars that are being used for welfare.
Because I’ve been unable to find any useful data, let’s do some back-of-the-evelope analysis. If we assume very conservatively that the average welfare recipient receives $10,000 per year, that amounts to $440 billion per year. A lot of money by any standard. Yet, at $10,000 per year, these folks are not exactly living the high life. But let’s not stop here. What the taxpayer should want to know is how much of a tax dollar actually ends up in the hands of the people we are trying to help. To continue with my SWAG analysis, I assume that for every dollar our governments take from their tax revenue pool to apply to the various welfare programs, forty cents is consumed by federal bureaucracy and twenty cents are consumed by state and local bureaucracy. If these assumptions are in the right ball park, it would mean that welfare bureaucracy is costing the taxpayers $1.1 trillion for a grand total of $1.54 trillion per year.
Now let’s think about that $1.1 trillion for bureaucrats. Let’s assume that the average bureaucrat costs $80,000 dollars per year in salary, benefits, consumables and, office maintenance. that would be 14 million bureaucrats if my math is correct.
So, our governments would have you believe that in the interest of income redistribution to help the most needy, you are required to contribute part of you tax obligations for this purpose. What they don’t want you to know is that besides helping 44 million people to live on crumbs, you are also paying for 14 million bureaucrats to live on a comfortable salary with great retirement and health benefits while you are struggling to make ends meet. Isn’t that nice. And we have only talked about one of thousands of government programs. Imagine how many bureaucrats you working to support in manner you would like to become accustomed to.
The bigger that governments get the worse it is for those that have to pay for it. folks, it is time for the taxpayers to revolt.
Well, that’s what I’m thinking. What are your thoughts?
