by Jerry Burke
If you're like me (and for your sake, I hope you aren't), the Alexander's Knots that are your 2002 federal and state tax forms remain empty, waiting to be filled with lies, bad math and foolhardy attempts to claim your dog as a dependent.
Why, oh why, must I suffer this indignity? What, other than that sordid night in Amsterdam and sitting through "Spice World" in a movie theater, did I ever do to deserve this? The answer: We are victims of the 16th Amendment of the Constitution, passed by Congress on July 2, 1909 and ratified on Feb. 3, 1913. "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."
Which, in layman's terms, means you are so not going out this weekend. Oh, that and you're responsible for making sure the government didn't take too much or too little out of your paycheck. That amount, naturally, is controlled by how much you (or your accountant) know about the tax code, which currently runs 17,000 pages and contains 5.5 million words.
Start hitting the bottle yet? Wait, there's more! In 1999, the IRS, the second most terrifying acronym after SARS, audited 1.36 percent of all tax returns filed by people making less than $25,000, compared with 1.15 percent of returns filed by those making $100,000 or more. Since 1988, audit rates for the poor have increased by a third, and fallen 90 percent for the wealthiest Americans.
Now before you pass out, allow me to further push you down the path of joy. Some of the largest American companies paid no income tax between 1996 and 1998, despite earning billions of dollars during those years. Drug giant Pfizer Inc., the people who made it possible for my Uncle Johnny to continue having sex well past what should have been his limit, banking group J.P. Morgan and General Motors were among the 41 companies that not only paid zippo tax but received $3.2 billion in rebate checks. The kings of corporate avoidance, the very bad people at Enron, received a net tax rebate of $381 million between 1996 and 2000. Over the same period, the company's profits totaled $1.785 billion.
My point? The intent in the approval of the income tax amendment was to amass national income from those who could afford it. Today the top 1 percent of Americans own almost 40 percent of the wealth, more than the bottom 92 percent of us combined. "Responsible wealth," "corporate responsibility" and "trickle-down economics" are useless, empty catch phrases. The government should stop picking on the little guy and shake down the new robber barons, before we go belly-up.
