Politics - Opinion

Politics - the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict amoung individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.  ~Google search

I, personally, love politics.  It is a tournament that determines your ability to sell yourself to a massive number of people.  There are many lessons that one can learn from watching politicians succeed and fail.

However, I don't like to talk about politics in my beliefs because they are so circumstantial.  My beliefs are rooted in fundamental truths and politics don't fit into that.

I will be sharing some of my points of view about politics over that next few months, just to get my thoughts out on paper, per se.

One topic that seems to be at the forefront of everything I have seen in the media is that no one understands what the job of the government of the United States is supposed to do.  What are the services that we require it to provide to us, as "We the people?"

I can spend the rest of my life quoting our founding father's, their beliefs and disagreements, but that only provides for us a starting point.  We only have to look at those amendments that were ratified since to see what jobs the government of the United States is responsible for today.

Read the revised edition of the Constitution of the United States of America, including the constitutional amendments that followed.  Take notes and write down your feelings, maybe even look up the context for which these amendments were ratified.

Take the 16th Amendment for example.

"The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

Does this read like an amendment that the common people would vote for today?

This amendment was adopted in 1913 and imposed a 1-3% tax on annual net income for 99% of the population.

However, the idea of requiring We the people to pay income tax has been around since 1812 to help offset the cost of our second conflict with the United Kingdom, the War of 1812.  It didn't happen then but later in 1861, after the American Civil War had began, the United States imposed an incremental tax of 3% and more on annual net income.  The Revenue Act of 1861 expired in 1872 and taxes disappeared again.

This was the original idea of taxes -- to pay off a large debt that the country had acquired and would pass on to its citizens.  Doesn't seem very nice of them to do that, but some would argue that it was for the greater good.

Taxes generate a tremendous amount of money for the government.  Today we have 320,000,000 (320M) people in the United Sates.  The median household income for 2015 was around $53,000 (53K).

Lets say that 40% of people filed single at the 25% tax rate.  60% of people would file the married tax rate of 15%.

128M x 53K x 25% = 1,696,000,000,000 (1.7T)
192M x 53K x 15% = 2.544,000,000,000 (2.5T)
2.5T + 1.7T = 4.3 Trillion U.S. Dollars (4.3T)

I think it is time to reconsider the 16th Amendment.  I think it is time to reconsider quite a few things about the Constitution that was handed to us.