I am a hardworking American.
I have four children.
I have a house with a mortgage, on which I pay interest and local property taxes.
I make charitable contributions.
I live in a high-tax state (Minnesota) and willingly pay the high taxes used to support one of the better run state governments in America.
According to the Republican administration, House and Senate leadership, Freedom Caucus -- the legislative dregs of the so-called "Tea Party" tax protest movement -- and my own Republican House representative (Erik Paulsen), my federal taxes are too LOW.
I am the beneficiary of too many "special interest" loopholes, such as personal exemptions for having children (which is not, incidentally, a cost-free exercise) and the deduction for state and local taxes for already (scandalously, I suppose) paying too many taxes.
Decedents who wish to pass more than $10 million in assets to their beneficiaries, and pass-through businesses that earn over $418,000 of profits every year (note: this class includes, for example, hedge funds, real estate funds, and most other ultra-high net worth asset management vehicles) however, are currently OPPRESSIVELY taxed by the federal government and desperately need me to pay additional tax dollars to further subsidize their wildly successful enterprises.
Accordingly, it is imperative and only fair that I pay extra taxes, principally for having too many children and already paying high taxes to state and local governments. In exchange, I receive a government with higher deficits (and thus a higher implicit tax burden on me and my children in the future), no increase in services, and the comforting knowledge that hedge fund managers and the plutocrats in the Trump administration will (including Messrs. Mnuchin, Cohen, and Trump himself) receive a massive tax break.
Particularly odious, the effect of the repeal of the personal exemption is that Republicans want me to pay an approximate $1000-per head tax on each my children to the IRS. Imagine that -- Republicans taking money from hard-working American families based on the number of their children, and handing that money to their favorite arm of the federal government, the IRS.
The following "anti-tax" voices have endorsed this massive government redistribution: the National Review, the American Enterprise Institute, Grover Norquist and all associated "anti-tax" fronts, most members of the House and Senate leadership, the House Freedom Caucus, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc., etc., etc.
Could it be that all the populist variants of the anti-tax rhetoric over the years (remember Joe the Plumber?) were all for show? Indeed - might it just be possible that these anti-tax voices subscribe to the fiscal policy of Leona Helmsley - taxes are just for the little people?
One may justly wonder what side these "anti-tax" voices would have sided with in that original tax protest from which they claim to draw inspiration -- as between the too-heavily-taxed job-creating landed gentry and mercantilists of Old England, on the one hand, and the vicious, corrupt, property-destroying and tax-evading colonists of the 18th century, on the other.
