Denying Government Money

I have talked much about money and how it is the life blood of government. Let’s discuss some other ways of denying government money.

Government Paraducers extract money and value from you in several ways. The most obvious is taxation. How do you limit your taxes? One way that we would not like to consider is reduction of income. (Is he sane?) Yes, if you can reduce your taxable income, you deny government the dollars it lusts for. The trick is maintaining a suitable standard of living.

You can do this by ensuring that your retirement savings are through tax free accounts, you take advantage of every tax loophole in the law, and you don’t do things that incur a big tax bite. I suggested buying used cars instead of new, remember? That transaction results in less tax revenue to the government (sourced by Producers), and you get an almost-new vehicle which looks about the same as it would a month after your kids got hold of it anyway.

You can reduce your income by having your employer pay certain benefits in a tax friendly way. Negotiating for them to pay more medical expenses in return for slightly lower salary may mean that you get those benefits untaxed while paying less income tax on your paycheck. Self employed people can set up very advantageous benefit plans to pay for health care with pre-tax money. Research these options with members of your cell group.

The goal is to live comfortably, without giving Uncle Sam a sugar high on your tax return.

You can also limit taxes by selecting purchased goods based on the tax you would pay. That’s what happened when Congress enacted a 10% luxury tax in 1990 and just about killed the entire yachting industry. Smart people avoided those items, and many people lost their jobs. Congress repealed the tax in 1993. Producers are not stupid!

Look at every receipt you receive for a month and compute the tax rate percentage. Food has one tax rate, gasoline another, restaurant meals another, hotel accommodations yet another. Find out who is taxing you the most and avoid them. You can eat at home a lot cheaper anyway.

Reduction of consumption also limits your taxes by limiting the amount you spend. Add up all those receipts you saved and see where your money went last month. You’ll be surprised at how much money you wasted. A little here, a little there, and it soon adds up to three or four digits, and the tax on that is almost a hundred bucks. That hundred bucks spins down the rat hole straight into the mouth of a hungry politician Paraducer, who needs it to strengthen the system against Producers.

So limit your consumption and deny a politician a meal.

An oft suggested tax saving method is barter, or trading. State laws vary on this topic, but you can use barter to obtain used goods for fair value in return. Here’s a better way. Work with your cell group to purchase only one or two of small items between your families. I have a hedge trimmer, but I only use it every 18 months. I could easily share it between five other families. That’s five hedge trimmer sales the government cannot tax.

I mentioned above that government extracts not just money but value from Producers. It does this by taxing their time. For example, I have to fill out some state forms every year regarding my company, and send them a check for $100. This takes about a half hour and is not that complicated, but it is a waste of my time, especially since the information on the form has not changed in ten years. Still, I have to burn time out of my life to comply with this Paraducer regulation.

Tax forms are similar. I would almost pay more in taxes if I could understand the forms and know that I was paying exactly the correct tax, not too much or too little. With the paperwork reduction act of some years ago, each form lists exactly how much time a competent Producer will waste out of his life filling out the form. That’s a Paraducer’s solution to the problem: Quantify the waste.

Standing in line at the DMV, filling out census forms, making estimated tax payments, killing an hour waiting to have your car inspected, all these things are taxes not only on our wallets, but on our lives. You have a limited number of minutes on this globe, and the government is wasting a bunch of them. Some of these indirect taxes can be avoided with a little planning and online alternatives.

Personally, I avoid the US Postal Service as a matter of principle. I needed to ship some packages to a person at a Postal Service facility years ago, and I asked my local postal clerk when the insured Express Mail packages would be delivered. She said that they do not guarantee delivery, but they would ‘probably’ arrive in a couple days. But it turned out that she could not ship my package anyway because the packing tape was plastic and would not accept the ink on their security stamp, used presumably to discourage Postal Service employee theft. So I had to go to a drug store and buy three or four ten-foot rolls of paper tape and re-tape all the boxes. What a waste of time. I considered shipping the packages via FedEx just to be ornery.

My local post office is only a few years old and is quite attractive inside. But under every counter is a trash can, hidden from view behind a cabinet door, with a little hinged flapper prominently marked WASTE. Every vertical surface in the post office displays the word WASTE in bold capital letters. Every time I walk in there I chuckle to myself. Is WASTE really the subliminal message the United States Postal Service wants to be transmitting to every patron? Jay Leno could write a million Postal Service jokes and not top that one from real life.

The funniest example of government postal behavior I have seen is the letter I mailed across town. It returned a few days later, obviously mangled by some multimillion dollar sorting machine that you and I paid for. The shredded letter was heat sealed in a little plastic baggie with large black lettering stating: WE CARE. My wife and I laughed ourselves silly on that one, and it’s still on our living room bookshelf, ready to show our guests who need a chuckle.

How about the daily newspaper I subscribed to, the one that was delivered daily only about four times per week? Once a month I would even receive the daily newspapers out of sequence!

Okay, okay! Enough already about the Postal Service. (Just say no, just say no…) I could write a whole book on them alone.