While no one relishes paying taxes, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that federal, state, and local income taxes consumed 9.2 percent of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950. Jesuit Father Fred Kammer, a former president of Catholic Charities U.S.A. and current president of the Jesuit Social Research Institute in New Orleans, writes that “some 30 years of anti-tax propaganda whose most vociferous current harbinger is the Tea Party” has given many Americans the false impression that they are overtaxed. In an article for Just South Quarterly, a publication of the Jesuit Social Research Institute, Kammer noted that the United States is one of the lowest-taxed countries in the developed world. Many states also have regressive tax policies that fall hardest on the working poor. Laws that cap property taxes and other sources of municipal revenue often erode the capacity to fund public schools, transportation, and social safety nets that protect the most vulnerable. These tax policies contribute to “a widening of the gap between rich and poor to its currently morally grotesque levels and the substantial deterioration of the U.S. infrastructure,” Kammer writes.
Link (here) to the liberal slated US Catholic to read the full article.
The current misery index (here)
The current state of American taxation (here)
Economic conditions under President Obama (here)
What is Aftershock? (here)
What is Liberation Theology? (here)
5 comments:
Statistics can be used to mislead, and that is what the Jesuit is doing. Approximately 49.8% of income earners in the U.S. pay zero income taxes. When you average those people and their incomes with those who pay taxes, they bring the average rate of taxation down.
My tax rate is 35% federal income tax, 7.65% Social Security and Medicare tax, 9.3% California state income tax, 1% SDI tax. That adds up to nearly 53% of my income that is subject to taxes. Then consider that California has a 7.25% state sales tax, and whatever you spend causes you to pay even more taxes.
The Jesuit should get a real job without the clerical exemption from taxation, he should rent or own property, buy his own provisions. Then I'd like to hear him whine that taxes are too low after he tries to make ends meet.
To cry for more taxes when you don't pay taxes yourself is worse than hypocrisy.
Of course an ivory tower, socialist, leftist, statist Jesuit would advocate such stupidity.
Question: Can anyone remember the last time a Jesuit inquired after the state of your soul?
“… Liberation theologians were the ones who finally succeeded in giving all those airy concepts of Teilhard de Chardin a practical meaning. But that would have been little use among the ordinary masses of believers, had the new “theologians” not succeeded also in transposing the meaning of all the key terms used to convey the basic truths and teachings of traditional Roman Catholicism. In their writings, you can see the quick, skillful way in which it was done.
The Church became the “people of God”, not the hierarchic Church of Rome. Sin is not primarily personal; it is social and almost exclusively the injustice and oppression due to capitalism. Mary the Virgin is the mother of a revolutionary Jesus—indeed of all revolutionaries seeking to overthrow capitalism. The Kingdom of God is the socialist state from which capitalist oppression has been eliminated. Priesthood is either the service given by an individual (the priest) who builds up socialism, or it is “the people of God” as it worships according to its like. The list of such adopted Catholic expressions is as long as you like. For each and every Catholic term about piety, belief, asceticism, and theology is taken over by Liberation Theologians.
The refinement of such co-opted terms permits grinning twists and ugly distortions of Roman Catholicism…ultimately, however, such use of Roman Catholic vocabulary, laden as it is with deep attraction for the faithful, provided an otherwise unattainable legitimacy for a this-worldly blueprint for the future. Cleverly used, the new “theological lexicon” nor only justifies but mandates the use of any means—including armed violence, torture, and violation of human rights, deception and deep alliances with professedly atheistic and anti-religious forces…”
Malachi Martin
The Jesuits
The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church
"Can anyone remember the last time a Jesuit inquired after the state of your soul?"
Yeah, at Mass today.
"Statistics can be used to mislead"
So can bloggers who don't mention state & local taxes, S.S. taxes, & sales taxes. The "have nots" pay all those taxes. Compared to the Golden 1950s (and other developed countries) the rich don't pay much in taxes at all. They take from taxes quite a bit (use of court system, roads, employees educated in public schools). Ask Mittens Romney.
Anonymous above, you're a typical reactionary lib who doesn't read any farther than what presses your buttons. The first poster mentioned all those various taxes, which you implied he omitted, in his second paragraph.
By the way, the wealthy pay a staggering amount of tax. The top 10% pay approximately 70% of the income taxes. So spare us the "pay their fair share" crybaby, veiled Marxist redistributionist crap, which has no basis in Christianity. Your entitlement, class warfare, statist, redistributionist mentality will undo the greatest country on earth and produce countless suffering when the society and economy collapse because market incentives have been destroyed and there's no more wealth to confiscate and redistribute.
Hey Mr. 5 p.m.--so much for "respectful and thoughtful comments"!
Once you're properly medicated please do a little reading about taxes, who pays them & who benefits from our publicly-funded infrastructure, and the ways that the super rich dodge taxes.
Oh, I forgot property taxes in my list of the taxes the "have nots" pay.
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