Taxing What You Don’t Earn
July 29, 2002
by Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.
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Taxing
What You Don't Earn

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"Watch out for bipartisanship," warns
an editorial in World Net Daily. "Whenever Democrats and Republicans
‘work together in a bipartisan manner,’ spending increases and government
enlarges."
The latest bipartisan collusion in
Congress proposes to tax income which does not exist.
Senator Barbara Boxer and Congressman
Christopher Cox propose to tax citizens not for what they have earned
but for what they have not earned.
For now the principle applies only to
parents with child support orders. But there is no reason it could not
be extended to the rest of us.
The congressional odd couple want to
tax child support arrearages as if they were income. The logic behind
this is not clear. But the idea seems to be connected with the concept
of "imputed income." According to Stuart Miller, legislative analyst
for the American Fathers Coalition, imputed income allows the government
to demand a portion of your property based not on what you actually
have earned, but on what the government says you should have
earned.
The Congresspersons say the tax penalty
will create an "incentive to pay child support on time." But the only
incentive it creates is for women to divorce and make more fatherless
children. It also sends more of a father’s earnings to the government
and less to the children who are ostensibly the beneficiaries of this
"caring" and "compassionate" government action.
"This appears to be the first time the
government is taxing people on something they don’t have," says John
Smith of the Association for Non-Custodial Parents’ Rights.
Once the government has set the precedent
that citizens must pay according what they can earn, rather than on
what they do earn, we all become slaves to toil for the government.
This is only the latest example of how
both parties are using dishonest child support crackdowns to fill government
coffers. It also shows how the divorce industry’s efforts to extort
money out of forcibly divorced parents threatens the freedom of all
Americans: incarcerations without trial, arbitrary searches and seizures,
government databases monitoring employment and bank accounts, gag orders,
imprisonment for debt, and now involuntary servitude – these are the
regular instruments the divorce industry uses to criminalize and expropriate
parents on whom it has imposed divorce.
The rest of us are next.
Stephen Baskerville