{"id":7403,"date":"2009-01-28T08:02:48","date_gmt":"2009-01-28T13:02:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=7403"},"modified":"2009-01-28T08:03:34","modified_gmt":"2009-01-28T13:03:34","slug":"another-tax-on-the-poor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=7403","title":{"rendered":"Another tax on the poor"},"content":{"rendered":"

US Governments are turning to taxes on the poor to make up their shortfalls. The Congress has just passed a new SCHIP bill that expands coverage to middle class children whose parents are too cheap to buy their own health insurance. They fund it with a cigarette tax increase. Now I read in the Washington Times<\/a> that states are increasingly turning to gambling, lotteries and casinos to make up their shortfalls;<\/p>\n

Proposals to allow or expand slots or casinos are percolating in at least 14 states, tempting legislators and governors at a time when many must decide between cutting services and raising taxes.<\/p>\n

Gambling has hard-core detractors in every state, but when the budget-balancing alternatives lawmakers must consider include reducing education funding or raising sales taxes, resistance is easier to overcome, political analysts said. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The libertarian in me is conflicted. On the one hand, I welcome the alternative to taxing me for my earnings and since I’m socially and morally opposed to gambling, it’ll never get a penny from my pocket. On the other hand, I don’t like the idea of more government regulations and the government intrusion, nor the idea that the tax is targeted at those who can least afford to waste their money. Inevitably it’ll lead to more problems with my tax dollars bailing out those clowns who foolishly spent their rent on the slot machines.<\/p>\n

Of course, these programs are eventually all doomed to fail. When cigarettes are so expensive that no one can afford to buy them, who’s going to pay the cost of the new additions to SCHIP? When States become addicted to gambling profits, what are they going to do with windfall? Put it away for a rainy day? Hell, no, they’ll spend it so that when the money falls off eventually they’ll end up raising taxes to feed their insatiable appetites for free taxpayer dollars.<\/p>\n

Of course, if governments cut out all of the ancillary stuff they don’t need to do, they could cut spending and not need to come up with wild schemes designed to cheat folks out of their money. But we’d need to change the culture before we can change the government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

US Governments are turning to taxes on the poor to make up their shortfalls. The Congress … Another tax on the poor<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}