Taxing Social Security & Pensions Is Criminal
By Gordon Bishop (02/12/07)
This is for all of you over-65 "seasoned" citizens trying to survive on your monthly Social Security, pensions and savings in an era of continuing inflation that diminishes the value of money every year.
Our federal and state governments drain us dry with income taxes and sales taxes and countless “hidden” taxes we never see but are passed on to us, the consumers, every time we buy something.
I turned 69 on January 1st and believed that when I to became a senior citizen on Medicare that life would be as good as when I worked for more than 50 years as a paper boy, a newspaper reporter and columnist while writing books and columns since my journalism career began in 1959.
I had no idea that with my successful career as a journalist I would not be able to live comfortably on my wife’s and my Social Security and our pensions. After the federal, state, county and municipal tax police take what they want from us, we’re lucky to have $50,000 or less a year to live on. They whack our pensions and Social Security payments because the tax collectors think any couple that can gross over $75,000 a year is “rich.”
If you live in New Jersey, as my wife and I have all of our lives, we have to pay for the highest property taxes in the nation, the highest auto insurance in America, and the highest cost-of-living in this once great land of the “free and the brave.”
How dare our federal and state governments tax our Social Security, our pensions and our savings simply because we gross around $80,000 a year. I can’t “retire,” so I continue to work a few days a week – just to pay our annual taxes! I have to work three days a week to pay the taxes on our pensions and Social Security payments.
New Jersey is so expensive that some 100,000 residents moved out of the Garden State last year, along with countless small businesses and even some middle and big corporations that find our economic climate too rich for their blood. They head for places where they can survive and perhaps even enjoy life a little bit, instead of just working to pay their federal, state, county and municipal taxes.
America today is a socialist welfare state! Gone are the days when government cared for “the people.” The elected politicians care only about “growing” government and to hell with the taxpayers that make government possible in the first place.
Our local daily newspaper along the Jersey Shore had this to say about New Jersey’s latest governor, Jon Corzine, and the tax-and-spend liberals who have practically bankrupted the withering Garden State:
“If you think for one minute that Governor Corzine or that bunch under the gold dome (State Capitol) cares one bit about you and your family, you are out of your mind.
“They are shameless and soulless.”
That’s right, folks. New Jersey’s governor and his wasteful political party have no shame and, even worse, no soul. It’s all about money, power and control. Fleece the working taxpayers, regardless of their party affiliation.
Corzine was elected in 2005 because he promised New Jersey’s more than 2.5 million voters that he would not raise taxes. Where have we heard that before?
The very first thing Corzine (who’s last name rhymes with “wine”) did when he was sworn in as governor last year was to increase the state budget by $2 billion. Corzine knew the former governor could not balance his $29 billion budget, so he decided to dump even more taxes on the working, taxpaying voters.
Why did Corzine commit fiscal suicide, knowing the state was on the brink of bankruptcy? He had to hire his pathetic, political cronies to expand the bureaucracy – you know, “growing the government.”
That’s how government works today. You take care of your own parasitic, mooching followers and let the taxpayers fend for themselves.
I predict that the liberal-socialist Jon Corzine will be another one-term ‘mistake’ in New Jersey’s long and failing liberal history. Corzine sleeps with the same liberal gang that gave us one-term Governor Jim Florio and one-term Governor Jim McGreevey, who had to resign when he admitted he was a homosexual and could no longer stay in office.
Yes, New Jersey votes for dysfunctional governors because there are too many dysfunctional liberal voters.
For the record, there are Democrats and there are Liberals. The party of Democrat Harry Truman and John Kennedy was hijacked long ago by the liberal-socialists who understand only one language: Tax and spend until you bust the budget and your state government can no longer balance its budget.
America needs real fiscal conservative Democrats like the late U.S. Senator from the State of Washington, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who ran for President in the early 1970s but lost in the primaries to another tax-and-spend liberal.
America needs another gutsy Tax Revolution, like the one our founders launched in 1776 to create a new nation – The United States of America.
Like cancer, taxes are corrupting the body politic and the future of America.
Wake up, voters, before we collapse, financially, as we did in the 1930s deep Depression.
Gordon Bishop
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