Ten States With Highest Percent of People Who Pay No Federal Income Tax

Just who are these people who don't 'take personal responsibility for their lives' and 'who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it -- that that's an entitlement.'

Red marks the ten states with the highest percentage of non payers of Federal Income Tax. Blue is for the ten states with the lowest percentage.

Many people who pay no Federal income tax do so because they are elderly, students, unemployed, or working people with very low incomes.

Why Do Some People Pay No Federal Income Tax

These people may pay many other taxes including the payroll tax, state tax, sales tax, gasoline tax, property tax, fees, tolls, and so forth.

As you may recall, the move to the Earned Income tax credit and child credits for working parents was part of the move away from welfare enacted during the 1990's as a means of giving people more incentives to work. It allowed them to subsist on low incomes by providing income tax credits in lieu of direct government assistance.

There is no question that the economic collapse has considerably increased the number of people who pay no income tax because of underemployment and unemployment. Additionally the median wage has been stagnant for decades, and the steady increase in inflation has been driving more people into the ranks of the working poor.

One way to impact this would be to enact policies that would increase employment AND the median wage, so people would have more disposable income for tax purposes.

However, this runs counter to the current extractive policies that favor the top few percent through tax loopholes, financialization schemes, and various forms of subsidies achieved through lobbying and the weakening of long standing regulation against frauds, monopolies, insider dealing and cartels.

The wealthiest complain that, on the whole, they pay the most taxes, even though the amount they pay may be a smaller percentage of their income than many ordinary wage earners. This is like the young man who killed both his parents appealing to the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.

One of the reasons they pay the most taxes is that they have gamed the system to take the most income, not by productive activity that enriches everyone, but through fraud and loopholes and influence peddling and government bailouts and subsidies. The growth of a monied interest, wielding inordinate political influence and economic power in the US, is becoming a problem of historic proportions, not seen since the last Great Depression. It is often a precursor of significant social change.

This tension of wealth inequality seems to repeat every couple of generations as reforms are enacted, and then people forget why they were put in place. This will be resolved as well, one way or the other.  The urge to self-destruction is very strong among the monied interests.  Its what they do as a form of revenge, for being born.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Predator and Prey

In speaking of the fictitious nature of the efficiency of unfettered market capitalism and the reality of its extractive and ultimately self-destructive nature Karl Polanyi wrote:

"To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society.

For the alleged commodity "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity "man" attached to that tag.

Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation.

Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed...

Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance, as well as its business organization, was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill."

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944

If you think that the financial repression in the economy, the manipulation of gold and silver prices, the rampant and largely unpunished fraud that almost bankrupted the country, and the years of victimization of the third world countries by economic hitmen are unrelated, then you might be in for a surprise.

For quite some time an element in western society has been promoting the market as the ultimate arbiter of value, best left unrestrained. And it is the market as they define it, and owned essentially by them, and designed to serve their interests. "Free markets" are as naturally occurring as seals that recite Shakespeare.

This fantastic conceit is not a new idea. In the last century such arbitrary, cold, and 'necessary' justice of the powerful was raised as if a god from any number of sources. And the value of human beings was calculated down to the last pfennig or rouble.

As the Third Reich so aptly put it, on the inner door of the hell that was Buchenwald, "Jedem Das Seine," or 'to each his own,' let each get what they deserve. 

"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people. What is called 'fellow traveling' (collaboration) was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo."

Theodor Adorno

And that was the justice of the unfettered market.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Sleepy Time Again

Another sleep day on light volumes, so shortly after the declaration of QE without end.

The real economy companies are saying ominous things about the character of their business prospects.

One has to wonder what Bernanke will have to do next to spur the markets. Strip naked and streak across the floor of the NYSE tossing out hundred dollar bills?

The action in oil is interesting.

Charles Biderman on QE3 and Its Affect On the Stock Markets

“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial. That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.”

George Orwell