Time expired last week for this country’s “Average Joe” to provide “dad” an annual reconciliation of the previous year’s pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
On April 12th, the week prior to last (“la semana antes de la semana pasada,” Memo; creo que), “Tax Freedom Day” was noted in the United States – though it most likely passed with complete indifference rather than the celebratory indulgences of a sort comparable to July 4th, the annual recognition of the latter ostensibly celebrating that day when New World colonists officially began a movement which seven years later, with September 1783’s Treaty of Paris, cast aside their government and its onerous tax system (should you wish to see how we nearly didn’t become a United States, click here.)
Too funny or, perhaps, too sad is when one realizes today more than 30 percent of those who labor and nearly 50-percent of households (they’re not the same, necessarily) in the U.S. annually pay no federal income tax at all, while just 10-percent of those who actually worked rendered unto Caesar 70-percent of the country’s federal income tax proceeds.
Furthermore, among that top-10, Internal Revenue Service figures show the topmost one percent (1%) of taxpayers in 2008 alone covered close to 40-percent of collected income taxes (the preceding provided to make clearer some previously published information seen under this byline).
The Tax Foundation’s Tax Freedom Day is a 24-hour period within when the average U.S. wage earner becomes unencumbered of a “voluntary obligation” to support others, given a simple description that most collected taxes go to other people (and, yes, this writer being an oxygen-breathing moron is unabashedly expert in the use of the oxymoronic phrase, further cautioning the reader that other such phrases, clauses and even entire sentences may, probably will follow).
Now, where were we?
Oh! It just occurred that some readers at this point may wonder about that which Ol’ DC is rambling or, perhaps, offer that such is best reserved for a place and time unrelated to sportscar racing.
Ignoring all who complain and possibly losing some, Ol’ DC nevertheless chooses to blaze onward, beseeching those who have remained to hang in there.
Last week’s Monday, April 18 and not Friday, April the 15th (no, it isn’t as scary as “Friday The 13th,” but should be) was this year’s absolutely, unavoidably final allowable day, give or take a couple of years, when an upstanding, hardworking U.S. citizen – presumably the reader of this being among such – was to provide Unca Sam a complete, line-by-line reckoning of his 2010 individual income and expenditures, the procedure being demanded in a society which supposedly relishes private and individualistic freedoms but which simultaneously exacts a charge designed, in part, to facilitate that freedom from the very same type of governmental encumbrances.
Thus, the “daddy” referenced long ago above is not that person who provided 50-percent of a successor’s assembled genes (along with a certain person contributing the other 50-percent; creo que hay, “su madre,” Memo), and is not he from whom we each gleefully “escaped” at the moment of our emancipations (the exact year and degree of which, for many, having coincided with various Vietnam War phases).
Nope, the above “dad” metaphorically speaks of The Tax Man, whose negative impact upon sportscar racing could be considerable if the guys who pay most of the taxes – among them “gentleman” racers like Chris Dyson, Duncan Dayton, Mark Patterson, Gunter Schaldach and John “300” Pew – get nailed with a substantial tax increase like that being presently sought by those who presumptuously decide “fair” is something other than the same “rules of play” being applied to everyone, regardless of “team.”
It’s nowhere close to extreme to say that hundreds, if not thousands of sportscar-racing jobs and the families in turn depending on them may be negatively impacted should the proposed “tax the rich” increases go through.
How so?
Having watched nearly each rocket ship sent aloft from Cape Canaveral and Cape Kennedy, this native Central Floridian has long wondered how those who complain about the cost of space exploration – the chief refrain being something along the lines of, “its enormous expenditures would be better directed to people here on Earth” – somehow entirely missed the point that millions of people, having families on Earth, not Mars, Venus or anywhere else, have been the beneficiaries of that money. They, however, actually worked for it.
Those who received space exploration-related paychecks – as well as the completely unassociated, unrelated yet still connected hundreds of others who were involved in the manufacture, transport and selling of the actual payroll-check paper, ink, envelopes and stamps, even your friendly mail-handling USPS union members – each have family who likewise need food, clothing, housing and educations.
Think deeply enough and one can derive any number of space-program benefits exacted worldwide that extend well beyond the oft stated “calculator” example.
In short: the space program had everything to do with feeding, clothing and housing millions of otherwise seemingly unrelated people.
So, too, does motorsports – from UPS employees accepting packages at EMCO Gears’ shipping department and its clerks to SunTrust’s smiling bank tellers accepting a paycheck for deposit.
Thus, the proposed income tax increases have much to do with sportscar racing, too, if one only takes time to ponder.
Many of those seeking the increases are somehow of the mind that the money they would exact from “Scrooges” like Dyson is otherwise just sitting around in some Swiss vault, a closeted shoebox or, perhaps in Pew’s case, acting as ballast in a Riley Technologies Daytona Prototype.
That one can write a single check in the millions of dollars, and have that check actually clear, is nothing less than mindboggling to this writer – for he darn sure can’t do such.
Yet motorsports and, most particularly sportscars, from its earliest days tied its very operational roots to those who can do such a thing, whether on a whim – as might’ve been the case for Briggs Cunningham and John Mecom Jr. in the 1950s and 1960s, or today’s Jim Michaelian and Henri Richard – or to fulfill the desire of entrepreneurial pursuit and reward, as have Roger Penske or Kevin Buckler, today.
While Pew races purely to challenge himself, the guys of Michael Shank Racing – the ones who co-drive, build, house, maintain, transport and repair Pew’s No. 60 Crown Royal Ford-Riley Daytona Prototype (sorry, John, maybe I should’ve used “Mark Patterson” on the “repair” side of the equation) – see the food, clothing, housing and educational side a resultant paycheck covers.
Take away the check that Pew cuts and someone like the lovable truck-driving Ralph Lohr hits the street because he in turn loses his paycheck.
“Oh, he’s highly skilled and he’ll find another truck-driving job,” quickly comes the retort from those who insist everyone should “play fairly.”
Um, maybe, but isn’t “going where you want to go; doing what you want to do” supposed to be among the first of those unalienable rights sought for this country’s citizens? That right certainly trumping a government handing money to those who’ve not worked for it, whether they be king or pauper.
Having rode “shotgun” thousands of miles with Lohr – essentially on a lark, but professionally doing what this writer wanted to do and going where he wanted to go – the reader can be assured that Lohr really, really enjoys his job with Mike Shank – including passing gas (it’s a double entendre, but a good one in Ralph’s case).
Meanwhile, Shank – whose actual “dad” put him in a race-car driver’s seat as a youth in a long ago, faraway time – no longer drives professionally but does, with a dozen full and part-time employees, maintain and field cars for those like Pew who wish to undertake that challenge.
Who among you are going to tell Shank to go find another job – after putting his employees on the dole, too – should The Tax Man suddenly instead demand the means which allows Pew to cut a check? After all, Pew no more has an inexhaustible supply of money than does the Federal government because everyone, every entity must spend intelligently, responsibly or none will have any chance whatsoever in even possibly doing what they’d best like to do, whatever such may be.
The above people – all of them, including this writer – are hardworking, concerned and family orientated taxpaying types who haven’t been on the largesse side of the tax system yet face such, and involuntarily so, largely because those already on that side and their advocates want still more.
Doesn’t such prospect seem terribly odd to others, too?
What a strange thing, “fair.”
Later,
DC
No comments:
Post a Comment