Income taxes are due, at the post office at least, tomorrow at midnight. But the average American will have to work another two weeks to pay off next year's taxes. In other words, Americans work 120 days for the taxman, and the rest of the year for themselves and their families. Tax Freedom Day falls on April 30 this year.

Though federal tax rates have declined in the George W. Bush years (after increasing under his two predecessors), state and local officials have, in the words of Andrea True, cried more, more, more. State and local taxes are at a 25-year high. The greedy fingers of state and local tax collectors grab 11 percent (PDF) of the national income. My home state of Massachusetts, thankfully, no longer fits its insult-nickname, Taxachusetts. It ranks in the middle of the pack for taxation. Its neighbor Vermont unfortunately does not lend itself to such a pithy sobriquet. At 14.1 percent, Vermont's take as a percentage of resident income is the worst in the nation. The Green Mountain State is a place where rich New Yorkers and Bay Staters go to die after they've made their fortunes. The confiscation does not oppress those spending a fortune as it does those trying to make a fortune. Next door, New Hampshire, with neither an income nor a sales tax, boasts the second lowest tax take at 8 percent. Only Alaska ranks higher.

One way of looking at income taxes, at least on the federal level, is to conclude that it could be worse. During World War II, for instance, the federal government imposed a draconian 94 percent rate on top earners. The 35 percent rate for top earners that exists now is less than the 40 percent rate that prevailed under Clinton. Since 1913, the annual federal income tax has generally been higher than it is today.

Another way of looking at federal income taxes is to see that the historic norm, in the United States at least, is no income tax. In other words, throughout most of U.S. history Americans paid no direct tax to the federal government. Such taxes were illegal, requiring an amendment to the Constitution to impose them. Save for an income tax introduced during the Civil War, and another one signed into law by Grover Cleveland in 1894 (and quickly struck down by the Supreme Court), no such tax existed prior to 1913.

It took the sixteenth amendment to allow the federal government to collect an income tax, but it doesn't require a constitutional amendment to repeal the income tax, to cut it, to flatten it, or whatever your curative of choice is. Combatting the evils of the confiscatory income tax is one instance in which putting the toothpaste back into the tube is not so difficult--in theory at least.

Exactly so, Dan.

However, as I put it in my post last Thursday - "Taxing Our Physical and Mental Resources" - the tax burden goes far beyond the level of taxation. You are correct in pointing out how state and local tax increases in most cases have more than "made up" for Bush's tax cuts: the average American now pays 32.69% of their income in taxes. Just as disturbing is the cost - in terms of time, money, and stress - that Congress and the IRS places on the taxpayer just to comply.

My post, and the supporting links therefrom, explains that burden much more, but as I conclude there, it is as if they required us to make bricks but have taken away our straw. The quantity of bricks (taxes) mandated is ridiculous in its own right; the deliberate effort to make compliance so difficult (through our near-indecipherable tax code) is unconscionable.

Right about Vermont Dan. They also have not only across the board sales taxes but each town or municipality piles on their own sales tax as well. State is loaded with Libs and old hippies, what would you expect.

This is pretty good....

http://www.snopes.com/business/taxes/howtaxes.asp