Author of Be Ready for Anything and The Ultimate Guide to Frugal Living
The US government is in financial trouble. They’ve been printing trillions of dollars backed by nothing, spending it on all manner of programs after they destroyed the economy during the first wave of Covid, and we’re $29,925,803,421,559 in debt as of the writing of this article, the highest it has ever been. The government is out of money, they have to get it from somewhere, and that somewhere is YOU.
Did you know at our current level of debt that the United States is paying $900 million a day in interest?
Obviously, this is unsustainable. But instead of cutting spending like the rest of us would do if facing such insurmountable numbers, there are bills on the table of Congress for trillions more in spending.
Some of the things the government wants to spend money on
The President wants to forgive student debt. So, who is left holding that bill? The taxpayers, of course.
In terms of its scale in budget and cost to taxpayers, widespread student loan forgiveness would rank among the largest transfer programs in American history. Based on data from the Department of Education, forgiving all federal loans (as Senator Bernie Sanders proposed) would cost on the order of $1.6 trillion. Forgiving student debt up to $50,000 per borrower (as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer have proposed) would cost about $1 trillion. Limiting loan forgiveness to $10,000, as President Biden has proposed, would cost about $373 billion. (source)
Who will foot the bill for Build Back Better? Good guess. Of course, we will. The bill would be funded by “about $470 billion in corporate tax increases, $530 billion in individual tax increases, and $148 billion net from additional IRS tax enforcement” according to TaxFoundation.org.
All of the nonsense about only raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and big corporations is just that – nonsense. Here are just a few of the schemes in the works to part Americans with their money. (Just in case inflation isn’t hitting you hard enough.)
Paypal reporting requirements
You know how President Biden talked about only raising (and going after) taxes on those big corporations and wealthy people who aren’t paying “their fair share?” Here’s a clip to remind you.
So if we’re going after folks like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, then why is Biden so adamant about demanding Paypal, Venmo, and other money transferring apps report any earnings over $600?
“For the 2022 tax year, you should consider the amounts shown on your 1099-K when calculating gross receipts for your income tax return,” PayPal said on its website. “The IRS will be able to cross-reference both our report and yours.”
The change to the tax code was signed into law by Biden as part of the American Rescue Plan Act in March 2021.
Previously, the payment apps only had to tell the tax authorities when a user had more than 200 commercial transactions per year that exceeded $20,000 in total value, an explanatory document on the tax change reads.
So what will the government do with this information?
According to the IRS, the data collected will only be used for “taxpayer education and outreach products and services” as well as “new examination and collection approaches.” (source)
When did an extra 600 bucks put us in the same category as the billionaires that Biden demanded pay “their fair share?” And if you think that the IRS will only use this information for “education and services” I have some beachfront property in Nebraska for you.
California wants to double taxes.
Every time I see California in the headlines I breathe a sigh of relief that I moved. It was a beautiful state with wonderful people, but the government made things completely unaffordable for a middle-class person – and I lived out in the boondocks, nowhere near Los Angeles or any of the wealthy enclaves. Taxes were outrageous when I lived there. Fuel was unaffordable. Electricity was unreliable and expensive. And now, a constitutional amendment is on the table (ACA 11) that wants to double income taxes on Californians.
Why? To pay for single-payer health care.
What would double income taxes look like? According to analyst Jared Walczak, it “would increase taxes by $12,250 per household.” But that’s not all. It would effectively punish businesses for growing and expanding with untenable tax burdens. And there’s more. This double income tax “would be imposed in addition to tangible property taxes and an 8.84 percent corporate income tax.”
Here are a couple of examples of how businesses could be affected.
For instance, the payroll tax exempts employers with fewer than 50 resident employees, punishing small businesses for expanding and creating a meaningful tax cliff. Imagine, for instance, the overly simplified hypothetical of a company with 49 employees making $80,000 each. At 49 employees, the company has no payroll tax burden. Hiring one additional employee generates a tax bill of $90,000—more than that employee’s salary!
Gross receipts taxes are widely understood as extremely disruptive and inequitable taxes, because they are imposed on businesses without regard to their profit margins. For low-margin businesses like supermarkets, 2.3 percent of gross receipts may literally exceed current profits even if the company is doing well. For instance, Kroger’s profit margins dipped to 0.75 percent in late 2021 and have historically hovered around 1.75 percent. These taxes are even worse for businesses posting losses, including startups that haven’t turned profitable yet, because they are taxed on their receipts even if their expenditures exceed revenues. For startups, a high-rate gross receipts tax could be disastrous. (source)
The mind-boggling effects of this taxation are discussed in the video below.
If Brian is correct and such madness occurs, the state could crumble from within. And then guess who will be left footing the bill? Oh yeah. The rest of America. Again.
Speeding Tickets
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who did nothing I’m aware of to help with the supply chain issues we’ve been facing, has a master plan for fixing our roads. He’s going to set us all up for a new wave of traffic infractions by lowering speed limits and increasing speed trap cameras.
Um, wait…he’s trying to reduce the national crisis of traffic fatalities. Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought it was just a money grab.
Secretary Pete wants to take the 1.2 trillion dollars from the Build Back Better infrastructure program and not actually fix the roads…No. He wants to use it to issue more speeding tickets via cameras. It’s more “equitable” than police stops. Tucker Carlson writes:
So what are we going to do about this? What is the $1.2 trillion dollar plan going to do for our crumbling infrastructure? Well, Pete Buttigieg has a plan. Here it is: More speed cameras, according to The Associated Press, Pete Buttigieg would like to quote promote greater use of speed cameras, which the department says could provide more equitable enforcement than police traffic stops.
Got that? So because of equity, you’re about to get a lot more speeding tickets from robots. See how that works? Shut up, racist, pay the fine. The government does need the money for infrastructure even after $1.2 trillion. (source)
Some of the infrastructure money will also go to hire people of color and women, as well as toward climate initiatives.
But it won’t go to fix the roads.
It’s about to be darned expensive to be an American.
We already have the most expensive healthcare in the world . We rank 21st in cost of living (although, I suspect that’s soon to change and not for the better.) We’re running the gauntlet of inflation.
Soon, these terrible decisions are going to turn us into a third-world country. And unfortunately, most of it is out of our hands. The government has done a dreadful job economically, but the American people will be the ones to pay the price.
What are your thoughts about these policies? Do you think they’re reasonable or outrageous? What can we do about it? Share your thoughts in the comments.
About Daisy
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, adventure-seeking, globe-trotting blogger. She is the founder and publisher of three websites. 1) The Organic Prepper, which is about current events, preparedness, self-reliance, and the pursuit of liberty; 2) The Frugalite, a website with thrifty tips and solutions to help people get a handle on their personal finances without feeling deprived; and 3) PreppersDailyNews.com, an aggregate site where you can find links to all the most important news for those who wish to be prepared. Her work is widely republished across alternative media and she has appeared in many interviews.
Daisy is the best-selling author of 5 traditionally published books, 12 self-published books, and runs a small digital publishing company with PDF guides, printables, and courses at Learn.TheOrganicPrepper.com You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, Gab, MeWe, Parler, Instagram, and Twitter.
In Texas there is no speed limit for private automobiles. However no one reads the transportation code. Read the code and fight the tickets no matter how small. Don’t pay the ticket, because they count on you not fighting. Don’t use a lawyer because they are part of that system. How many lawyers read the code as to whom the speed signs apply to? When it becomes more expensive for the courts then things will change.
School Loans are a trap. My sister in law borrowed forty thousand, but now owes over one hundred thousand. Freeze the interest and people could pay it off. It is cheaper to get a bank loan than a student loan. At leaset you have a pay off date. Congress, their families and aids get their loans forgiven already.
Thank you for mentioning student loans. I feel terribly sorry for those American students caught on that bait. Deadly trap. When it started in my country, the loan was the price of about an intercontinental airplane ticket. Not more. Forty thousand? And it’s just the start. Beware of those student loans (unless you have really strong willpower and discipline)… and unit-linked products…
You’re right about student loans.
You’re wrong – and dangerously so – about the Texas speed limit and your advice could land someone in jail.
Read the code it Says who the speed signs apply to! My friend who was an engineer also designed roads in Texas. He went to court when his daughter got a ticket. He proved the sign did not apply to private automobiles. You should READ the transportation code rather than believe propaganda lies and myth. You would be surprised what the law actually says. I read the code! Have you? No one reads the law nor is willing to fight their tickets with the true law!
People do not realize, that when loans are forgiven or written off – they will receive a W-something, because the IRS treats those as income! It is income because it is a value the forgiven do not have to pay to their creditor. Those whose student loans are forgiven are in for an unpleasant shck.
People need to understand that counterfeiting was once a death penalty offense back in the centuries when only private individuals did it. Then when governments and central banks got into that business of stealing purchasing power from their populations (beyond what was taken via the published tax codes) those governments and central banks were certainly not going to hold themselves accountable for counterfeiting. The 1694 creation of the Bank of England was an early and classic example.
The result of such currency counterfeiting is that over time as such new fake money finds its way into an economy, it pushes prices upward. The earliest recipients of such fake money (especially the oligarch buddies of the Fed) get the benefit of buying up valuable assets (products, businesses, real estate, precious everythings, etc) BEFORE prices go up. That theft of value is called the Cantillon Effect. Later after the prices have been pushed up, the middle and lower classes suffer the effects of purchasing power that was stolen from them … while unfortunately the ancient death penalty of counterfeiting is no longer available since government is doing it.
If you run an online search with phrases like WORLD HISTORY OF FIAT CURRENCY DESTRUCTION on honest search engines like DuckDuckGo.com or swisscows.com (but NOT via the hopelessly compromised Google.com), you’ll pull up links to many articles about government’s always thirsty appetite for more spending than they dare publish in their tax code — which leads to counterfeiting of their paper currencies (or in our era, governments are salivating at the prospect of mis-using crypto currencies in an equally criminal way). That also explains why governments despise gold, silver, or other precious metals backed money systems because they can not counterfeit it to steal purchasing power from the citizenry.
Here are just a few examples of such histories. There are many more online.
https://www.dinardirham.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-fiat-currencies/
AND
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/12/alasdair-macleod/the-psychology-of-money/
AND
http://waupaca.info/editorials/fiat-money-in-rigged-economy-1913-to-2019/
America lost their honest money system when secret British money put their favorite shill (Woodrow Wilson) into the American presidency in 1912 … knowing that he would sign off on the coming Federal Reserve Act, the coming income tax, the stealing of Senatorial selections away from state legislatures, and the murders of as many Americans (like the 1915 Lusitania torpedoing) as it might take to suck America into the coming European civil war (that we were taught was World War One).
There is no “public” aka government school in this country that will allow their history books to accurately label their government and the Federal Reserve organization as institutionalized counterfeiters. What a surprise…
–Lewis
Thanks for the economics lesson Lewis. Perhaps some people will catch on. But it seems like the entire democratic party and the people who keep voting democratic believe in the utter nonsense of Biden’s Build Back Better spending plan. There are so many recent and real world examples of the insanity of trying to create a prosperous economy by just printing money.
First it was Keynes and his deficit spending nonsense. The latest insanity is Modern Monetary Theory which the democrats have embraced as the modern version of turning lead in to gold. But instead of using the mythical “philosopher’s stone” to turn lead in to gold they will turn paper into gold or more accurately turning zeros and ones in cyberspace in to economic prosperity. But this will cause inflation because everyone knows if you increase the supply of anything you reduce the value meaning the purchasing power of the dollar is reduced and things cost more. Your monthly pay check buys less etc. But the MMT mages say no worries, we can prevent inflation by raising taxes.
Here’s the Einstein version of MMT explained simply.
Think of the economy as a box with an arrow pointing to the box and the arrow labeled money in. Another arrow coming out of the box is labeled taxes out. You have a dial labeled money in, a dial labeled taxes out and a two meters. One meter labeled prosperity and the other meter labeled inflation. According to MMT by adjusting these two dials money in and taxes out just right you can a perfect economy with full employment and no limits on government spending on anything because the MMT mages can control inflation by taxing the money out of the economy. If you are thinking too much money printing is bad and fixing it by taking it out of the economy is the solution is an example of a logical fallacy in Modern Monetary Theory then you get an A. Congratulations.
And like our antifa commie hero Joseph Stalin was suppose to have said “It doesn’t matter how people vote. It only matters who counts the votes.” And so it doesn’t matter what inflation really is. It only matters who gets to say what inflation is, namely the government and we know the government would never lie. And yes that is sarcasm.
They will hyper inflate the economy. They will lie about inflation by pointing to scapegoats who they say must be taxed. And as you recall fake president Biden will require banks to turn over to the Internal Revenue Service bank account information for all accounts holding more than $600. Why because all you hundredaires are causing the inflation meter to go too high and need to be taxed even more.
IMHO, government spending/debt is a foregone conclusion no matter who is in the WH, in Congress, or in control of Congress. The government has tied itself to so many social programs, aid for other countries, NATO, subsidies, the military, sheer bureaucracy, waste/fraud/abuse, etc. they could not stop spending if they wanted to, or tried to, even if they all agreed to.
Then there are the hijinks of the Fed like QE, strapping a turbo charger to the printing press, who’s actions are coming to light as inflation. Nixon going off the gold standard could another tipping point event.
America going from a independent energy supplier to a dependent one did not help. The shale miracle is a mirage. Those wells deplete at an exponential rate, and require a lot of water. Water is going to be the new oil or even gold in the coming years.
Student loans. This one pisses me off. I do not recall where I saw it, but more than a few articles showed that the students who would benefit most from student loan forgiveness, came from middle class to rich white families. My daughter in her mid 20s, has no student debt as I started her a 529 college plan back when she was not potty trained. In order to meet that financial commitment of contributing so much money a month, I had to work a second job for more than a few years. Or, go without luxury items, like dinning out once a week.
So, yes, my daughter benefited from her education paid for by capitalism.
My question is, where were all the other parents (see middle class or rich white people) who did not do the same for their children? Too busy spending that money on McMansions, big screen TVs, gaming, new cars (anyone find it interesting all those pics of people in their vehicles, lined up for food banks, those vehicles were not exactly run down, but a lot of late model, upper class) etc.
Inflation of dang near everything is hitting not just the lower economic class, but the middle class too. Our purchasing power is diminishing every day. At what point do we walk in to the grocery store and see no eggs, no milk, and then panic? A year from now? A few months? Next week?
“The government has tied itself to so many social programs, aid for other countries, NATO, subsidies, the military, sheer bureaucracy, waste/fraud/abuse, etc. they could not stop spending if they wanted to, or tried to, even if they all agreed to.”
true. if george washinton were president and thomas jefferson president of the senate and jefferson davis speaker of the house, even they could not avoid deficit spending in these times. but the biggest driver of deficit spending is the debt dollar itself – the dollar is a pyramid scheme.
We were definitely not middle class – or if so, lower LOWER middle class – but I also sacrificed to pay for my kids’ education – one university degree and one trade school license. At the time they didn’t realize what a big deal it was. But now that they’re in their 20s and seeing their friends hit with what seems like never-ending debt, they’re very appreciative.
“At what point do we walk in to the grocery store and see no eggs, no milk”
at the point along the way – production, warehousing, transportation, sales – where it’s no longer profitable to do so. and not just from inflation – consider walgreens which pulled out of san francisco because of the rampant unopposed shoplifting. the shelves didn’t go empty, the store disappeared.
“A year from now? A few months? Next week?”
been thinking “a few months” for 14 years now.
$600 is the same reporting threshold as other income “streams” -1099-MISC, W2-G, etc. A lot of people sell on eBay as a business, regardless of seller name. Yeah, some folks make good money on garage sales but pricing at garage sales is a lot different than eBay. And there are hoarders – remember the toilet paper prices from a few eBay “sellers”?
Speeding fines are handled differently in some European countries than the US.
All this debt was no incurred in the last year – it is a culmination over decades. Greenspin “surpluses are bad” was BS. To start, when the country had debt, we technically had no surplus. And IMHO, we’re seeing the trickle down sales job coming due.
Yuppies who pumped maximum pre-tax money into 401k’s are now crying because they have to pay taxes. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Just wait till children of those with extremely large 401k accounts realized their tax bite if mom/dad pass away before much was taken out. 10 years to drain the 401k these days for non-spouses.
“Greenspin ‘surpluses are bad’ was BS.”
no it wasn’t. he meant they were bad for the people he worked for.
“The Government Has to Get Money from Somewhere So They’re Coming for YOURS”
not exactly. used to be true, but now not so much. the government can get all the money it needs in loans from the fed. the new purpose of taxation is to control how much money YOU have.
No in fact the government really does get all the money it needs from You!
It gets it from direct taxation and inflation of the money supply. Loans from the Fed are used to create money out of nothing which increases the money in circulation which reduces the purchasing power of the dollar meaning higher inflation. Inflation is a tax and hurts the poorest people the most and the wealthiest people the least. You can’t create prosperity by just printing money. All that does is redistribute the wealth in the economy. This is basic economics. See mises.org if you want to learn more about economics.
You might like the below video that explains how because of monetary inflation “The fixed income groups permanently lose in relative wealth and income.” You might like my reply to Lewis above also.
Debunking Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSYlzxczAY4”
“You can’t create prosperity by just printing money”
it does for the ones printing it.
Thank You Captain Obvious.
It’s like the old saying; You can’t get blood from a turnip.
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“Soon, these terrible decisions are going to turn us into a third-world country. And unfortunately, most of it is out of our hands.”
For the last 40-50 years We The People have elected the leaders that have lead us to where we are. We had the ability to pay attention and vote for better leaders. We could have watched them instead of listening to them. We have the government, and the results, that we voted for.
People think dollars have value but they don’t. They are just receipts for the work value you created. The government does not need your tax money to operate, they can create all the dollar receipts they need. The real purpose of taxation is to control inflation by transferring the the work value from the dollar you earned to the dollar receipt they created which had no work value behind it. The total number of dollar receipts in circulation always equals the total work value created in the economy, regardless of how either is created. When the Fed creates money (dollar receipts) that are given to the investment banks to buy stocks, and the companies receiving that money use it to pay for the creation of new goods and services, there is no inflation created because the money supply increases at the same rate as the increase of goods and services. However, when the Fed creates money with no work value behind it and the government gives it to the public for Covid relief, the effect is to reduce goods and services in relation to the money supply and you get immediate and oppressive inflation. When you deposit money in the bank or your retirement account you are really depositing work value. By simply printing dollar receipts to increase the money supply, the government can take the work value you created out of your saving and retirement account and you have no idea the real work value of your money has been taken. Rich politicians with large asset holdings love inflation. The value of what they hold increases in value without realized gain so they become even richer without work or taxation. However, those who have no assets and must work for a living see the value of the dollars they earn decrease by the day. Politicians claim they will tax the rich but that is a complete lie. The rich are never taxed because they do not earn their money from labor. Money creation always has to be paid for by the wage earner. The Covid relief scheme was a bait and switch operation by rich politicians. Lets tell people they are getting free money but lets not tell them that it will create inflation that they will have to pay back with rising prices. Once inflation goes up it never goes down so now we have to keep paying it back forever. Is it stupidity or malice or both?
In 1776, we went to war with Great Britain over a 2 cent Tax on Tea, that Parliament decided to levy on the Colonies. There were other issues, but “Taxation without Representation” became the catchphrase defining a government that doesn’t represent its constituency.
Looking at how much we’re taxed now, often for frivolities that the American Taxpayer is forced to pay for, whether we agree with the frivolity(s) or not. To say we’re being taxed without representation is an understatement.
Methinks another Revolution doth approach.