Did you even know you have until Monday, May 17 to file taxes?  I'm guessing a lot of people have no idea.  I keep getting "tax-day sale" junk mail, so I guess many businesses don't know it, either.

I started thinking about the government and taxes when friends mentioned not having to pay any taxes this year because of the losses they sustained in their business due to COVID.  They lost money because they couldn't open the doors.  Their landlord lost money because he couldn't collect rent, and the investors lost money, as did the suppliers.  It was a chain reaction all the way down the line.  The ramifications of COVID on the middle class, the business-owner, and the laid off workers are huge.

Thinking about all the people who failed this year, whose businesses closed, and who lost their jobs, I realized that these folks are not going to owe the government tax money this year.  Granted, the top 1% pay 38.5% of the taxes collected, and 97% of all federal taxes are paid by the top 50% of earners, but I'm guessing some of those folks had businesses fail this last year, too.

Our government is going to be hit, proportionally to how badly off we are, with a problem of too little money taken in — Not to mention that it's been doling out checks all year.

Not that our government is really running on tax receipts at this point.  We've gone far beyond that.  As discussed in my recent article on inflation, we're printing paper money in order to pay for things — which ought not to work any better than when you or I do it.

My next thought is about who loses the most under the circumstances.  Certainly, the government will continue to pay its obligations, because, however worthless the paper may be in reality, the government has to stand behind it.  It really has no choice, or the country becomes totally devalued.

If I had to guess, I'd say we in the middle class lose the most.  We stand to receive the least from the government to start with, being proudly self-sufficient.  I'd also say we've lost the most over the last year, both in money from government-forced failure and in losing the freedom to live our lives using our own sound judgment to dictate how we do so.  We've lost the security that comes from living in a well ordered republic, where laws are applied equally.

For the first time in America, all of us, truth be told, live knowing that, if the government wants to turn on us, it has the power, which has been demonstrated again and again — Most recently with the dichotomy in how it treated the deaths of Ashli Babbitt and Daunte Wright.  Both were killed by cops.  The only difference: political expediency.  Ashli was a pawn of the left, whose killing served to advance the narrative that white supremacists "invaded" the Capitol.  Daunte was killed because a veteran officer made a bad mistake, and because he was not following police instructions during his arrest for a felony warrant.

The result, besides the disparity of impact on the lives of the officers who did the shooting, is to again chip away at the rule of law, against equal justice, against trust in our government.  In fact, I'd say our government has become so untrustworthy that it couldn't make me happier that people aren't having to pay it a heck of a lot this year.

Image: Taxes by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels.

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