Taxing What You Don’t Earn
July 29, 2002
by Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.
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Taxing
What You Don't Earn Real Media Format |
"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.