The Mislead Majority (or Why Everyone Misses the Issue)

Now that the primitive, reactionary, lizard-brain response to the latest Romney ‘place foot in mouth’ self-inflicted disclosure of his thought processes has revealed yet again that neither party knows what they are talking about, the media is possibly more clueless (as impossible as that would be given the significant nonexistence of intelligence in party die-hards), and the public is complacent and uninvolved in even attempting to think about the salient issue at the core of Romney’s “47%” faux pas. So yet again we have the bulk of the public attention span misdirected to nonsense, nuance, and nothing of import. All this off-point commotion directed at an important issue that is not being discussed meaningfully, because not one person has understood the right question or the enlightening answer that goes to the heart of Romney’s sentiment.

Now I have come to expect to be disappointed by Congress and politicians of any other stripe, and I have become immune to the debilitating insight shown by news entities, and I am confident in the public’s attention to the magician’s misdirecting movements while missing his picking of their pockets. So in an anti-Borgian attempt to fight for a futile endeavor to provide a view that has not surfaced from this gaff or from many preceding ‘sound-bites’ from all sides and in every conceivable context where America’s tax system and policies are supposedly discussed. The words you hear in these discussions would lead the casual observer to actually believe that someone is talking intelligently about taxes despite the fact that they are so far away from intelligent that we are dealing with the knowledge level found amongst rocks.

In opposition to that trend, I am presenting a puzzle for you to solve. It’s not a difficult problem, and it’s not going to require any complex knowledge or in fact any information that anyone who went through an American high-school would not have had explained to them.

Puzzle: Imagine two Americans, one “L” who earns $25,000 per year and the other “M” who earns $1,000,000 per year. Both, oddly enough, have equivalent deductions. As a result of these deductions, “L” owes $0 in taxes by the federal tax table. Now consider “M”, after working about 6.5 days “M” will have earned the same $25,000 as “L” did for the entire year. How much tax does “M” owe the IRS for that same $25,000?

Once you have figured out the answer you are ready to answer the puzzle. The puzzle is: Who was treated unfairly?

Do not read any further unless you have your answer, when you’re ready did you arrive at: Neither?

They were treated identically. The American tax system does not tax anyone at a higher or lower rate given comparable applicable tax situations. For the first $25,000 earned each party owes exactly the same tax liability. Each was given the same government “hand-outs” and “entitlements”. Why then are both Republican and Democratic leaders unable to understand this? If they are going to take a position on an issue, you would think that they would at least try to be informed about the issue.