Scott Cumbie

For the first time in the history of our country, we are experiencing yearly deficits that are greater than $1 trillion. To put this number into perspective, if you spent $1.4 million a day, every day, starting the day that Jesus was born, it would have taken you until the 1950s to have spent a total of $1 trillion. To make matters worse, this year our total national debt will approach $14 trillion dollars.

When Congress talks about fiscal responsibility, they usually discuss cutting our deficit, but they rarely say anything about what we need to do with our debt. The national debt is the more important problem. The larger debt grows, the more of our tax money goes to paying interest on that debt.

The Democrat solution to cutting the deficit is usually to do two things: tax the rich and tax the corporations. The dirty little secret is that you and I end up paying these extra taxes.

When Democrats raise taxes on the rich, they encourage the rich to hire lawyers and accountants to find ways to shelter their money and they encourage the rich to move their money out of the country where it cannot be taxed. When taxes are raised on corporations, corporations are forced to either pass the taxes onto their customers (us) by raising their prices or cutting costs. One of the ways that businesses have cut their costs over the past two decades has been to move jobs and manufacturing out of the country. So, in the end, you and I that end up paying extra taxes through higher prices or lost jobs.

The solution is not just to lower taxes, but we must seriously consider completely eliminating the federal income tax. If all personal and business income taxes were eliminated, then we could expect the following to immediately happen:

1. Jobs would immediately become available. Since businesses would not have to pay taxes on income, they would have more money available to invest back into their business which would result in more jobs.
2. Jobs that had been moved out of the country, including manufacturing jobs, would begin moving back into the US.
3. Money that “the rich” have moved out of the country would come back into the US. This money would then be available for small business investments and would cause interest rates to go down.
4. Individuals would not have taxes taken out of their paychecks; we would have more money available to pay off debt, or to purchase products. In both cases, even more jobs would be created.

Taxes are necessary to pay for the activities of any government. When a government takes too much from its people in taxes, the people suffer. As John Marshall stated in the Supreme Court case McCulloch v. Maryland, “The power to tax is the power to destroy.”