by Chris Wallower

Created on: November 01, 2008

Taxation without Representation

10/31/08

As the economic situation swirls around the bowl, I tend to tune out NPR on my drive to work. Instead I find my mind wandering; searching with desperation for something, anything else to think about. This morning I found myself looking at the license plates of the passing motorists and taking note of the ones from out of state. Connecticut, New York, Michigan, but then I saw a familiar face starring back at me. It was the Old Man in the Mountain that graces the plates of New Hampshire residents. His chiseled granite features made me reflect on the aging and decaying values of our once wonderful nation. Even its motto seems a relic of days past. "Live free or die." It sounds more like something that would be uttered in the infancy of our nation, when we struggled against the bonds of oppression, not today when we struggle against four lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic and overly complicated cell phones. So I began to search for a state license plate that would better surmise where our nation is today, but they all seemed to only advertise what they had within the state and showed me how pointless a game this was and how truly bored I had really become. It was at this time that I turned my attention back to the radio and listened to the economic peril. And then it came to me. A kindly driver from Washington, D.C. was nice enough to cut me off and give me the motto that I had been searching for: "Taxation without Representation". I do realize that they put this on their license plate in protest to the fact that they have no elected officials in Congress and still pay federal taxes, but it still got me thinking.

The government pays for a lot. It has healthcare, Social Security, the military, highways, research institutions, public schools, government contractors, organizations, agencies, administrations, and businesses all requiring money from the federal government. And where does the money come from to pay for all of these things? Taxes. Taxes on income, purchases, imports, exports, trades, and the like give the government its annual budget from which it can disperse funds to all of the programs that it supports. So taxes are very important. They allow everything that we do to be done. According to John McCain, the United States taxes businesses the second to the most out of all the G8 countries. Although according to a recent study by the Government Accountability Office, approximately two-thirds of corporations don't pay

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