"They Just Took My Money" [John J. Miller]
That's what my 8-year-old son said about the sales tax on the ride home from Borders a few minutes ago. He had a $10 gift card from Christmas, bought a Clone Wars book for $7.99, looked at the receipt, and wondered why he still didn't have a full $2.01 on it.
This is how conservatives are made.
That's also how bad, dim-witted citizens are made, who use city services but think they don't have to pay for them. No doubt Miller lectured his son that the government stole his holiday gift money; it seems to be a conservative trait to teach your children to grow up both full of entitlement and utterly unwilling to acknowledge that someone will have to pay for their clean water, roads, cops, teachers and everything else civilization provides for them.
Stop paying taxes, fire all the teachers, and use your Borders card to buy homeschooling materials. The child should be playing with string and buttons and building tree forts to shove girls out of anyway.
10 comments:
Stop paying taxes, fire all the teachers, and use your Borders card to buy homeschooling materials.
And don't use the roads that belong to taxpayers to go to Borders. Don't use the post office to ship stuff. If you really want to put your money where your mouth is, only eat non-FDA inspected meat.
But then he didn't pay $7.99 for the book. Virginia "Sales and Use Tax" is 5% and although the Virginia law states that "The tax must be separately stated and added to the sales price or charge", an honest seller would have advertised the total price or both prices. Or was he expecting the kids coming in to buy the books and then resell them?
So essentially, the seller lied to Miller's son and the kid (not to mention the father). Long live free enterprise!
And while he's at it, he can forbid his kid to play in public parks, since they were built by the evil people that "stole" his money.
What a moron. Instead of taking the opportunity to explain to a curious child that all these things that surround him have to be paid for somehow, he beams with pride over the kid's ignorance, no matter how understandable his young age makes it. It's forgivable coming from an 8-year-old, but it's insufferable from a grown adult.
Bulbul, you would think he'd train to son to calculate the sales tax in his head, add it to the purchase price, and deduct the total from the amount of the gift card. I had the same situation--the kids forget about sales tax.
How do people manage to convince themselves that they would have more money if public works were privitized? You're going from a (supposedly) non-profit business to a profit-based business. Doesn't that mean prices would rise?
Susan,
yeah, or that, seeing as Miller is a believer in personal responsibility. I come from a land of VAT and tough customer protections and to me, it's the seller who's the real culprit.
Heh, here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, it's corporations that must be obeyed and worshipped. We exist to serve them.
I think I respect the need for taxes as much as anyone, but expanding the sales tax to booze, most of the price of which is already various excises, is just wrong, wrong, wrong.
And of course, I'm saying that in a completely objective manner.
Forget using the roads to get the kid to the bookstore--how does proud Papa think the books got there? How much does he think the book would cost if its delivery didn't benefit from the economies of scale afforded by good highways?
This isn't even political indoctrination. It's simple ignorance (on the kid's part) and stupidity (on Dad's). Like father like son!
I just don't get why conservatives think taxes are "the government taking my money". Ok, it makes some sense in the case of sales tax or if you're self employed and have to cut the government a check every quarter.
But the taxes that are withheld from my paycheck? My employer may say my salary is X, but I can't see getting worked up about taking home less than X. I never see the full value of X, and my salary is determined on the assumption that I never will see the full value of X. If taxes disappeared and roads and schools were paid for by magic, my employer would problem respond by cutting my pay so that I'm still taking home the same amount. Taxes were never "my money" to begin with.
Perhaps the receipt could detail how much of the $8 goes to the author and illustrator. That too might teach a valuable lesson about "fairness".
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