Op-Ed by Alice Salles
The month of April is a nightmare for anyone with a conscience, as we only have until “tax day” — which usually falls on April 15 — to give the taxman what he says he deserves. So if you pay taxes to Uncle Sam and you’re also aware you’re paying for mass murder in the Middle East and in U.S. streets due to the drug war, you should also feel sick to your stomach as you write that check.
To a restaurant customer, this may have served as enough incentive to remind his server that taxation is always immoral — but he didn’t stop there.
Last week, a customer at a Missouri restaurant gave the waitress a “personal gift” instead of a tip, writing the now popular line “Taxation is theft” in the tip section of the receipt.
In a second note, the fiscally conscious customer added:
This is not a tip. This is a personal gift and not subject to federal or state income taxes.
With major progressive news outlets like ATTN: reporting on this story, left-leaning reporters started to debate wages in the food and service industries, discussing the fact that tips end up being factored as wages, meaning they are always taxable.
But as that discussion developed, reporters were quick to realize that when personal gifts are in the mix, the taxman can’t take part of those earnings away. After all, a gift would have to exceed $13,000 to be subject to taxation, meaning that even if the customer had spent hundreds, the “personal gift” would not amount to anything close to the requirements stipulated by the IRS.
As this story becomes part of the popular movement ignited by libertarians, expect to see more progressive news outlets becoming familiarized with the actual concept of taxation. What’s left for us to find out is if they are going to change their tune and start attacking people like this customer when the two-party pendulum swings once again and a fully Democratic slate takes over Washington.
Are they going to remain consistent in discussing taxation from the point of view of the worker, or are they going to side with the leech?
Only time will tell.
Easiest way to get your first bitcoin (Ad)
Opinion / Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo / Image: ScotHibb
The tax that ticks me off the most is your property tax.You pay off your mortgage and pay rent to the government.You never really own your home.
No owns their homes even if you pay cash for them. All you get is Color of Title. Real title is held by the Vatican I have read. If you do not have Allodial Title or a Land Patent you are a tenant. It is all a massive scam!
Even then, you are still in the jurisdiction of a Diocese with a ‘Vicor(god) General’ in charge. The church has divided up the whole world, because they love Jesus so much, lol.
It’s not The Lord Jesus Christ that they love. Their “god” is “mammon” — MONEY! And the “he” that they serve is the god of light or Lucifer/Satan. It’s written into all of their “arcane archanundrums” and gives full credence to the term “Illuminati” which also is a “light” subject.
A full, cover-to-cover, reading of God’s Own “word,” The Bible, without having accepted His Son as your Savior will not profit you one iota. After you become a Saved Believer in The Lord Jesus Christ, The Holy Spirit of God Will fully reveal the Scriptures in their entirety.
Depending where you live, property taxes pay for municipal services like garbage removal, street cleaners, library, schools, street lights, police & fire, city/county employees. Of course if you want to live out in the middle of nowhere with none of those, you can do that.
You are wrong. This is what they want you to think. It is all a part of your brainwashing. Now use your brain. Our ‘money’ is just scraps of paper with ink on them. Federal Reserve Notes are nothing more than legalized counterfeit. They can and do print all they want. There is no need for taxes at all. Taxes are how they wage war against you, along with getting everything for nothing with their counterfeit ‘money’. If you had those printing presses would you need anyone’s money? Of course not. Use your brain. Besides this federal law applies to federal employees. Are you a federal employee. Besides that tips are defined as a cash benefit paid to federal employees. Learn how to read and understand the law. It is all a war of deception. They are not your government. They are the synagoge of satan.
My brain works fine but thanks for sharing your perceptions, both true & false.
Of course taxing the people was the solution banksters gave Uncle Sam when he expressed anxiety of being instantly broke, following passage of the Federal Reserve Act, that conveyed ownership of all paper currency to them. Along with funding government, taxation is to keep the value of currency artificially high by taking some out of circulation, making dollars more scarce to little people (not banks.) True that taxes are not needed (at the federal level) because they can & do print as needed for policies that we-the-people ostensibly agree on, but there’s 3% management fee attached to all dollars printed (or credited) for the Federal budget, compounding since 1913, known as the “debt,” which can never be repaid.
Still the script is currency we accept & exchange, and state & local municipalities, governments & service providors I mentioned do need to be paid.
You are somewhat correct and yet you are wrong. Taxation along with counterfeiting is how they wage war against all of us. Taxation deceives you into believing their counterfeit has value as well as curbing your ability to see the inflation caused by overprinting making it all worth less causing you to pay more.
If you want to see the real reason for taxes Google the Youtube video “Corporation Nation”.
Hear ! Hear !
And if you don’t pay your taxes the State can take it away from you by way of a County Sheriff. That includes a home that you own free & clear. You are quite correct. “They” can take it, Unless you have Aloidal Title to the house and land. Check that out. Do your research. There is a way to prevent them from Theft of Your Personal Property.
I was a waitress for a heartbeat – literally 3 weeks. In training, I didn’t receive tips, just the $2.00/hour — (yes, it was a large chain restaurant and they only pay $2/hour) – but because restaurants can’t pay less than minimum wage, they actually “guestimate” tips to bring you up to minimum wage, and REPORT THOSE AS INCOME … even when the REAL tips were less than that reported by the restaurant to the IRS. What???? How can that be legal? You are being taxed on invisible money that isn’t actually earned, but is reported so the restaurant can’t get in trouble for paying less than minimum wage. This should be so many forms of illegal. I fixed the problem by leaving that industry after I saw what occurred.
Worked in restaurant industry for years for $2 hour but never had anyone try this. You should have reported them.
Why report them…?? They could have easily handed the server the money as a gift without making a point on the tab.
See something…say something…is that it…?
No I’m talking about reporting the employer that was ripping off this waitress by reporting tips to the govt whether she made any or not to make it look like they were paying minimum wage. I always leave cash for the server cause it’s none of the employer’s business how much you make in tips.
One of my daughters was a server for close to a year over 30 years ago. After she told me what was going on, I have ALWAYS handed the gratuity DIRECTLY to the server so that it didn’t have to be reported even to the employer. I still do this today.
They pretty much all do that. Quite legal too. Another reason they want to kill cash with digital ‘money’ based on energy and your carbon footprint, so they can take a little piece of every single transaction for everything.
DoubleTree in Tucson did that to me 20 years ago. 🙁
That’s criminally insane.
The income tax was created, along with selective service and the federal reserve, so that the people would pay for the slaughter of others and themselves in world war 1, while those in Wilson War Cabinet and their cronies along with the owners would profit immensely. Smedley Butler states that the US military is nothing more than the muscle for racketeering by war profiteers, puppets and money monsters. Yet, as news such as this is being “hailed”, the people still want big military to protect them from manufactured boogymen, which includes anti-humans of their own country. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ce102243821cbf3f2bfb1e6dce9a51c37d93234faa8d301fc52ace145c8929db.jpg
1913 was a very bad year for US citizens.
Those at the very top have no need for money. They do need to keep us all under there thumb though. The system actually attacks wealth from every angle lest we discover a glimpse of what could be. They hide wealth, destroy wealth, prevent wealth and distort the idea of wealth.It is a sad story and also a most fascinating one.
Robert Hemphill, for 8 years credit manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta said:
“If all bank loans were paid, no one would have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent monetary system. When one gets a complete grasp upon the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible-but there it is. It (the banking problem) is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it is widely understood and the defects remedied very soon.” -Famous Quotations on Money, by Sheldon Emry
Loans are actually assets to the banks that create more credit for the banks to lend. Your promissory note is leveraged 10X according to fractional reserve bank practices.
Their “loans” are fraud. They lend nothing.
I always hand the tip to the server in cash.
“I was asked to sum up my book ‘The Creature of Jekyll Island’ ” said G. Edward Griffin, under a hot D.C. sun…”can you say the biggest scam in the history of the United States”…circa 2008 at the Ron Paul Freedom march which had 10,000 thousand good folks passing the unfederal bank which was booed by one and all.
The unfed baloney bank was given to the unholy goat worshipers on 12/21/1913 by the treasonous Woodrow Wilson. The unconstitutional IRS was formed in 1914 to extort labor.
END the FED and all zentral bankz and a thousand years of peace and prosperity will commence.
TAXATION is THEFT.
Sacrifice the goat(s).
Silver stakes required.
After the income tax act was ‘passed’, the first tax implemented was a 1% tax on incomes over $50,000, which at that time made it a millionaire’s tax. Income was defined as money derived from investment, savings interest, rents and leases; in other words non-wage. There was no withholding tax on wages until FDR implemented it in the thirties, along with gold confiscation.
I believe the first and best tax reform would be to declare wages (including non-bonus regular salaries) as non-taxable. The next phase would be to work on a repeal and replace plan that would implement some kind of non-VAT consumption-based tax. I would also support a constitutional amendment ending all taxes on land itself, and on paid-for primary residences, as existing property tax structures place a permanent lien on the people’s primary residences, making it impossible to ever own it outright, and therefore requiring us to act as bond-servants paying ‘rent’ to the ‘plantation owner’ until we die.
Of course, to make it work the Federal Reserve act would also have to be repealed, honest money would have to be reintroduced, a fair-trade system of tariffs would have to be implemented, unfair treaties would have to ACTUALLY be repealed, the military’s mission would have to be altered from ‘maintain global hegemony’ to ‘defend domestic shores’, and immigration halted (and all recent immigrants legal and illegal sent home) until such time as full employment of the citizenry is achieved; which of course means we would have to make our own things and pick our own crops. I don’t think any of this is likely to happen; I suspect we’ll get WWIII instead. Duterte in the Philippines may be tough enough (for now) to drive the Rothschilds out of his country, but it seems unlikely to happen here. Anyone up for starting a viable third party?
Is forced taxation involuntary servitude?
No, but your forced labor is.
Forced taxation is extortion; a crime. In a free country all taxes have to be voluntary. The income tax is supposedly voluntary so I quit filing in 1979, but then again I learned how to read and understand the Internal Revenue Code.
Let’s take a step back a bit. Consider first what you claim to own. If you own land, consider that it used to belong to some native or person before who lost it to you by various forces, be they banking or military. Someone else may want what’s yours but those banking and/or military forces protect you and what you have, so long as you operate by their rules. Your ownership rights are not defacto. Your taxes are paying for their protection. In that sense it is a protection racket, but without which what you claim as yours would not be for long. Taxes also pay for infrastructure. It peeves me that people who benefit the most (the wealthy) are clever to pay the least. There are benefits to our civilization after all, and costs. That said, there are causes and industries where I protest taxes being doled. “Voluntary” would not apply to taxes which by definition, are not. Sounds like some conservative utopian notion but conservatives “know” (or should” that “utopia is impossible,” but DYStopia is well within our reach! (sic) 😛
The reason they get away with it is because they can. Citizens are too afraid and lazy to speak out and so it will go on till you are planted in the ground.
Great. Just think what your monthly bills will look like when everything is privatized and in the hands of rapacious corporations and it costs you ten bucks a day. with yearly increases, to get to and from work on the freeway you used to travel on for free paid for with everyone’s taxes as a ‘commons’ good. I’d say lets go in the opposite direction and nationalize all major infrastructure of importance to the people as a whole, beginning in taking back the power to create money and issuing it debt free. Then water, electrical, natural gas, major transportation as a share in that industry, intelligence and the military just off the top. Then the people would have a government that actually delivers services to them instead of servicing you know who with your tax payments.
I agree and banks are the first private institution I would nationalize, but some would call that socialism, killed by character assasination that accompanies that label.
I expected the slings and arrows of the libertarian sect to my comment. When intelligence is dominated by the likes of Booze Allen and Stratfor and the military by the MIC the public should realize the trouble they’re in, let alone having our currencies and credit owned and issued as debt all owed to themselves by private for profit banksters who then through this power get to decide which direction society takes while looting it at the same time, is a preposterous top down control mechanism over practically everything and one. Yeah, give the people the freedom to regulate capitalism on the public’s behalf and have that become the Washington (Wall Street) Consensus.
Agreed, absolutely. It’s the fix where some of us might differ.
That is the beauty of the internet. It is open to the free discussion of ideas and thoughts.
A centralized banking system is the 5th element of communism. It is essential for controlling the economy in the way they want. Learn the Golden Rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.
Gold is but one class of asset and not the most valuable, probably established by the Annuki when they made and enslaved humanity to work in their mines. I would take air, water, food, shelter over gold, in a heartbeat. Plenty of civilizations operate fine without gold, it’s shiny, an obsession of immature minds. The use of gold as a backing of currency is entirely artificial. The Romans used it and the world was no happier a place. Banksters realize that all assets have value, we should learn at least that much from them. The ruthless make the rules with their threats of killing you, what they value, be it gold or something else, is irrelevant to their depravity.
Good comment. All the malfeasance we see today has also taken place under a gold standard. Rome being a prime example. The secret to managing a currency is in issuing it in the correct Quantity. Money needs to be plentiful to be robust in its velocity and only increased enough to keep it plentiful without causing inflation
The US must be the only country where tips are registered with the tax authorities. Everywhere else people leave money on the table for the wait staff.
The problem is that for the IRS it doesn’t matter what someone calls something; it is substance over form. With respect to “tips,” the IRS determines that the “gift” is in fact a “tip” because it is directly related to the service provided and ipso facto “income” to the server.
And as long as we have CASH we can conduct our business in private. Credit cards are convenient but leave paper trail of everything including your predicted profile. [Like the wife who was canning & husband going camping that went shopping on the internet after the Boston Marathon & got raided by a SWAT team]
If we end up with digital only money [the banker’s & govt wet dream] then we become slaves that are completely controlled. Not only can they tax every penny but if you step out of line they erase you.
Socialists, Progressives, Neocons, et al. will have to side with the leech. It’s how the Ponzi scheme of the ruling class is kept going…. at the end of a barrel of a gun.
End the FED. Currency created from and backed by nothing, owed back with interest. The ultimate stealth tax (inflation).
If “taxation is theft” is a meme, then we all deserve the government.
If you execute a “Notice of Understanding and Intent” with your State’s and the US Attorney Generals, you can forget about all tax. This legal instrument cites all their crimes against humanity and frauds and removes you from their jurisdiction. Be sure arrange to use your Notary’s address as your return address so the Notary can attest in writing to the fact that they never responded and they can’t without incriminating themselves.
Actually, one can gift up to $14,000/year, not $13,000, to any individual they desire.
that photo needs to go viral. The most vile part of that “tax” is the idea that we have to make public our private business and finances.
My position is that great wealth is often (not always) obtained by depriving others of their due value. For example CEO’s rewarding them 5000X% the grunt on the floor. Well soon the latter will be robots so fewer humans to pay, but without jobs, how will consumers afford the goods the CEOs’ robot factories produce? A guaranteed income then, works for me.