Opus 2013-185: Where have all the taxes gone?

I am out of school so I have a little more time.  I was reading some of the blogs that I enjoy and came across a post on Grant Cunningham’s blog that explains a royal FAIL from law enforcement.  The tragic part of the post was that a woman was raped after a break-in.  She called 911 and was told there were no deputies available to respond.  In this case the police were more than minutes away, they never came.  It might have been different if she had been armed, but such was not the case.

In the article he goes into a lot of detail about why there was no money for police protection in her area.  The overall reason was that the county was not collecting enough in taxes to maintain all its services.  What slips through the cracks, because it is so carefully covered by the government and ignored by the media are the multiple reasons there were inadequate tax revenues.

First, you have a government land grab.  Land that had been used by logging companies, ranchers and farmers was reclassified so that it could be “protected.”  Guess what?  The government does not pay taxes to itself except in the form of printing money or stealing from the Social Security Trust Fund, thus the tax base was reduced.  I would assume that the land grab was at the request of some environmental group who wanted to preserve Gaia for future generations of dolphins.

Secondly, the environmentalists themselves filed frivolous law suits.  The lumber companies withdrew because they could not keep paying the legal fees.  This further reduced the tax base.  I thought it was common sense that if no one makes money, no one pays taxes.  Gaia may be god but she doesn’t have a tax ID number.

The government subsidized for a time, reducing the amount available for other things.  They did this for PR reasons, I am sure, but as time went by they started reducing the subsidies. 

Jump forward in your time machine.  Less land being taxed.  Less business being taxed.  Both of those mean fewer workers being taxed and more people on the dole. 

It sounds to me like we need another government program to get us out of this mess.  Or maybe we could raise taxes on the rich.

Not.

homo unius libri