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Everybody hates paying taxes (I mean, it's taxes for goodness sakes), but some American are vehemently opposed to them.
To find out exactly why, researchers polled a group of middle-class, small business owners in the South, an area known for its anti-tax stance and support for the Tea Party. They discovered that the issue of taxes isn't just about dollars and cents - it's basically about fairness:
The participants "portray taxation as a threat to the moral order because they believe taxes deprive deserving hardworking middle class people of dignity, while rewarding others who are undeserving (both rich and poor)," the researchers write this week in the journal Symbolic Interaction. [...]
The interviews in the new study revealed participants associated income taxes as violating the moral principle that hard work should be rewarded, the researchers noted. So rather than being associated with a free-market ideology or a person's own economic interests, at least for these taxpayers, tax hostility was more linked with moral principles.
"When Americans lash out at 'takeovers,' 'massive taxes' and 'bailouts,' they are looking at these issues from the perspective of a hardworking middle class besieged on all sides," Kidder said in a statement. "Tax talk is about dollars, but it is also about a moral sense of what is right."
Jeanna Bryner of LiveScience has the full story: Link
There many forms of taxation the government can use to raise funds. The income tax just happens to be the most vile, abusive, and manipulative form. It also happens to be the most power giving, so I doubt we will ever seen and end to it.
Income tax: the more you earn, the more you pay. Yes, that seems fair to me, given that the more we earn the more we can AFFORD to pay. I never see the money anyway, so it's never really mine. I wonder if Indy wants all the benefits I've listed provided for free. The money has to come from somewhere.
Seriously, let's cite irreconcilable differences and call half red, half blue and the other half whatever. We're not getting along anyway, let the tax-free moralists have their own place to be morally superior.