Our Taxes Went Up

Despite the grand, wonderful, glorious, bipartisan fiscal cliff law everyone who works gets to pay more in taxes, and not just the rich.

The Great Robbery of Wage Earners

If you think of American wage-earners as swimmers, they were mostly underwater after 2008. Then last year, wages increased a bit. It was only 2.4% for the year, but it was like coming up for a slight gulp of air.

Now think of Congress and the president as the people in a boat pushing the swimmers’ heads back underwater. That’s exactly what they did when they let the payroll tax arrive on the first day of 2013.

The 2% increase wiped out virtually the whole wage gain for the previous year. It came as a shock to most workers. “There goes my raise,” was the cry heard all over the Web in the first week of the year.

Michael Daneau, who works a lighting store in Rhode Island, posted on his Facebook wall:

“I opened my paycheck today and noticed I got less pay than I usually get on a regular 40 hour week. Obama stole $20 more out of social security. So now I’m back to making what I was making before my last raise. All that hard work paid off! Stick around more hope and change is coming!”

Read the rest.

Another highlight:

Another factor here is the following: Ever since the 1940s, the payroll tax has been fobbed off on the public not as a tax, but as an insurance premium for services coming later. You know, like Social Security and Medicare. In the market, we pay premiums for services delivered at a later date all the time. Isn’t this just the same?

Well, it’s not the same. For one thing, these “insurance” programs aren’t insurance at all. They are direct transfers of wealth. Young workers today are paying the bills for the money that retired workers have already spent. That’s not the market at work. That’s pure redistribution.

Another crucial factor here: No one elects to pay these stupid taxes. They are forced on us. And just as a sweet little reminder that this is true, the government prosecuted a prominent case of failure to pay just days after the payroll tax when up.

Fox News reported on Jan. 6:

“An eastern Wisconsin business owner will spend about a year in prison for failing to pay taxes that had been withheld from employees’ wages.

“According to court records, Lisa Bartz Vanden Elzen, co-owner of Dairy Transport Services of De Pere, failed to pay about $193,000 in payroll taxes. She’s also accused of failing to pay the Internal Revenue Service $81,000, the employer’s matching share of those taxes.

“The Green Bay Press-Gazette reports the 47-year-old was found guilty in U.S. District Court of failing to pay payroll taxes that had been withheld from employee wages from July 2005-December 2010.

“She was sentenced to 366 days in prison and ordered to pay restitution of $274,000 for federal tax violations.”

The message is that the government means business. You may not refuse its benevolence. If you do, you will go to jail. There is no way out. They’ve got the guns.

I need a catchphrase like "enjoy the decline."