Eastern Europeans Are More Free Than Americans
By Dave Gibson (10/14/05)
The nations of Eastern Europe are now converting to flat-tax systems, after their rather short experiment with the inherently flawed U.S. income tax system. It only took the former Soviet satellite nations about ten years to recognize our system as unfair and useless. When will we wake up?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist Iron Curtain was razed--free market economies began to emerge. Of course as citizens began to reap the rewards of capitalism, the issue of taxation reared its ugly and much-feared head.
The U.S. government was all-too ready to spread their own out-dated and ill-functioning system of taxation to those new democracies. At the expense of the American taxpayer, teams of IRS employees were sent to these nations to set up a U.S. style form of income tax collection.
My own father-in-law (then an IRS employee) was sent to Poland for two years on a mission to spread the virus of oppressive taxation. Now, less than a dozen years later, Poland is looking to convert to a flat-tax.
The former Soviet-block nations are currently where democracy can be found in its most pure form. It is no coincidence that these same nations are now rejecting the U.S. method of taxation. Seems as if teacher could take a lesson from student!
Countries currently operating under a flat-tax and their rates are as follows:
Estonia-24%
Georgia-12%
Greece-25%
Hong Kong-16%
Lithuania-3%
Romania-16%
Russia-13%
Ukraine-13%
Latvia-25%
Serbia-14%
Slovakia-19%
Once Russia abandoned their confusing and often abused tax system (which was based on the confusing and often abused U.S. system), revenues soared. According to a recent Hoover Institution study, tax revenues in Russia under the flat-tax grew by 28% in 2001, 21% in 2002, and 31% in 2003.
As reported in a recent edition of The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. tax code set a new record last year by bloating to no less than nine million words (twelve times more than the King James Bible).
With the excessive income tax rate, the so-called death tax, and a mandatory Social Security program which will soon be bankrupt--many Americans see very little incentive for hard work or entrepreneurship.
Why should we be penalized for success?
I believe that a national sales tax is the best option to the current nightmare that is the IRS. Not only would we be able to keep everything that we had earned but in that system, everyone would pay. Even drug dealers and welfare cheats would be forced to fork-over a portion of their ill-gotten cash. The underground economy would be tapped for the first time in American history.
isn't it amazing that eleven years after the so-called Republican Revolution, and a two-term Republican president--we are no closer to eliminating our oppressive and confounding tax codes? George Bush and the Republican Congress have been on a five years spending binge that would make the most liberal of Democrats blush.
As for any real tax reform Bush will never even consider it. You see our so-called 'conservative' leader has turned out to be a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Perhaps true conservative Americans should now think about relocating to Eastern Europe. There seems to be no room for us here, as we have apparently been duped again.
The United States is slowly (or not so slowly) becoming a socialist nation. The Republican and Democratic parties have in fact merged. They would be more accurately described as the right and left wing of the American Socialist Party.
Copyright © 2005 Dave Gibson
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