The foundation of taxation in the United States has always been based on the idea that those who have more, pay more in taxes. The logic being that those who have more, in property or income, require more resources from the government to support it. Their wealth requires more use of the roads for transportation. Their wealth requires more protection by the military and police.But there is another school of thought out there. That school of thought is simple: if you are poor, it is due to some moral failing. So, as such, it is the state’s obligation to punish that failure by imposing punitive taxes on the poorest of us all.





This tax model is called regressive taxation, and is everything our founding fathers stood against. Across state after state, the Republican party has been implementing programs designed to hurt the poor – which puts more people into poverty, resulting in higher crime rates, requiring more police force to manage; further increasing the problem.

States in both the south and the west, according to the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy, have some of the most regressive taxes in the nation. And these taxes are typically not income taxes. From the report:





This, of course, will confuse many, but the reason why is simple: people in poverty spend a greater proportion of their income on non-income forms of taxes:



Now, you can see that Washington State, a very liberal state, has some of the most regressive taxes, which might lead one to say that this proves something. What is ignored is the cause of this: one man, Tim Eyman.

Tim Eyman has figured out a loophole in the state’s initiatives system, which enables him to screw over the poor through badly designed tax scams which he then tricks voters into passing. These tax scams include authorizing discriminatory hiring, making private car owners pay for the cost of commercial vehicles, changing property tax laws to make poor households pay the taxes for wealthier households, and many, many more. He has managed to turn what once was a very progressive tax code into one of the most regressive, by exploiting the citizens’ initiative system in the state.

And this is how it works generally in most states: the GOP puts out a tax policy which would directly hurt the poor, then wraps it in flowery language so people don’t recognize what is happening. As a result, a person at the poverty line in Mississippi will be paying $2300 more in taxes than the same person in Vermont, keeping them in poverty.

This brings with it the problems of poverty. Studies have found that with every $100 increase on taxes for families living at the poverty line, one would see an additional 7 deaths and 78 property crimes per 100,000 people. In addition, a quarter of a percentage point more children will fail to complete high school. Which means that by encouraging this regressive tax code, Republicans such as Tim Eyman are, in fact, encouraging more crime. They cannot claim to be tough on crime while encouraging the increase of crime.

The United States is a progressive country. The fight for regressive taxes is a fight against the people of the United States. Nothing new here for the party which also seeks to eliminate the right to vote for the same people they are inflicting with regressive taxes. This is a strategy to establish a crime state, with overlords and oligarchs living in gated communities and the peasants in grand ghettos.

This strategy to dismantle this great nation by the Republicans is most obvious in the shift from progressive to regressive taxation, to make the poorest among us pay for the services enjoyed by the richest. When the richest 1% of Americans own 40% of the total wealth while paying significantly less, you’ve got a problem. In fact, if you took the same pool which paid for 40% of the taxes, you’d have to expand to the top 10% of wage earners to get 40% of the total taxes paid.

This is a great scam, attempting to pander to ill-educated people to encourage them to enslave themselves through economic means. The population of people in poverty has exploded in red states. This is a fight to bring about economic slavery. They do it by creating this anti-American, anti-government, anti-society rhetoric and repeating it to their base.

And after decades of fighting for it, they have now created a race to the bottom, expanding poverty to levels not seen since the Great Depression, and they are aiming even lower.

Nathaniel Downes is the son of a former state representative of New Hampshire, now living in Seattle Washington.

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