Quote:
Quote by: Zeebadee  The Constitution makes it clear that the government's responsibility is to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare". How do you expect to accomplish these tasks without having some form of income (taxes) for the government to pay for them? |
Well, I won't quote go to the point that Blef did, let's take this from a more practical point of view.
Those things are listed in the Preamble, or the introduction to the Constitution. The introduction states what the purpose of the Constitution is, it doesn't set any specific goals or tasks for the government. The rest of the Constitution lays out how the government is to work to accomplish those purposes and what specific goals will be worked towards in order to accomplish those purposes.
There is so much wrong with what we have today compared to what was listed as the powers and limitations of our federal government. I would contend that the allowed forms of taxation would be enough to provide a Constitutional government, without any form of income tax or other tax on individuals. The original Constitution allowed for excises and taxes on imports. If more was needed, it was to be collected from the states. The states were effectively allowed to tax however they saw appropriate, consistent with their own Constitutions, to provide for the federal government.
The IRS collects some $1.2-1.5 trillion.
Internal Revenue Service - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
If we were to provide a national defense, rather than international offense, we could reduce our budget by approximately $8billion/month, or just under $100billion/year for expenditures in Afghanistan and Iraq alone.
The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11 Extending those reductions to anything that doesn't provide protections to Americans, in America, (as provided for in the Constitution) would likely reduce the entire military budget from nearly $500 billion, to approximately $100billion. A total reduction of $400billion or nearly one third of total IRS collected revenues.
It has been estimated that the cost of the War on Drugs (a blatantly unconstitutional prohibition) runs somewhere from $20-100billion. Picking a conservative middle number of $50billion gives us total savings, now, of about $450billion per year.
Deparments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Corps of Engineers, EPA, International Assistance programs, NASA, National Science Foundation accounts for around $1,050billion
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy...s/hist04z1.xls. None of those are authorized by the Constitution. Takes us to a total of around $1.5trillion.
Add in the costs of running the IRS itself, and by returning to the government authorized by our Constitution, we could easily eliminate the IRS and, probably, return to the system of revenue generation intended by our founding fathers. And, might even show a surplus that could allow us to start to cut the national debt of which we're paying nearly a half trillion dollars in interest payments.
And, HEY!!! (to return to the topic) if we eliminate all of those unconstitutional expenditures and efforts, we might have the opportunity to protect our borders from ne'er do wells from crossing.
Keith