Taxes & Interest Killing More Americans than Iran?

Letter to Romans: Americans are in a “survival debt” mode thanks to inflation & a $1.25T credit-card bill. Meanwhile, our govts keep raising taxes & fees. One new proposal even wants to impose a new national car registration tax. Can anyone spare us a dime?

As it happens, my local county board just CUT the 2027 real estate tax it’s going to impose by lowering last year’s 83 cents per $100 of assessed valuation to $80 cents; public outrage over last year’s 12% average hike had a lot to do with it. Yet, as the late great economist Milton Friedman would say, the authorities never saw a dime they didn’t spend “plus anything else they can get away with.” In the case of my county’s taxers, they more than made up for the 3-penny real property tax cut by upping the cost of a meal in restaurants from 4 to 6% & imposing a 5% tax every time they go to the movies or amusement park.

True, the greed or foolishness is hardly limited to governments. As the WSJ recently pointed out, banks’ “soaring interest rates” have “led to the highest [credit card] delinquencies since the financial crisis. As an example of even comfortable folks now living in “a pattern of survival debt,” it cited an operations director at a New England hospital “lying awake at night wondering where she went wrong.” Despite her $194,000 salary, we’re told, the lady’s bank credit card balance crept up to $15,000 … “She could afford the $572 monthly minimum, but with a 26% interest rate, it barely made a dent.” You’d think our govt leaders, who face the same financial problem, would grasp most folks’ need for relief. Yet the tax hits keep coming. Perhaps the most ill-timed if not outrageous tax proposal cited by the WSJ is a new “national car registration tax” on top of existing state registration taxes. The “cash-strapped” Swamp apparently doesn’t want to incur voters’ wrath by upping the already high fed gas tax & on top of Iran War prices at the pump.

Davd Soul