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Tax Freedom Day came on May 2 in Colorado, but for the average American, that happy day does not occur until May 8.
Everything you earn after Tax Freedom Day is yours, so that you can pay your creditors. What you earn before Tax Freedom Day goes to some government or another: The local pothole-repair crew that drinks coffee all day, the Colorado Department of Education to enforce quotas, the federal government so that there is $27,000 available for J. Danforth Quayle's golfing excursion to Atlanta.
(To be fair, let us hear from Quayle's official
spokesman, David Beckwith. The vice president works
hard, and he deserves to be able to accept an invitation to
play golf once in a while. . . . It is another media cheap
shot about Dan Quayle.
To be thorough, let it be known
that the J.
in J. Danforth Quayle
stands for
James.
To be curious, why does he prefer Dan Quayle
to Jim Quayle when he's trying to be a regular guy instead
of a rich kid who made it big?)
At any rate, the average American is deprived of the fruits of his labor for 127 days of each year. It is fair to assume that most people will work for about 45 years, from age 20 to 65. So that's 127 days from each of 45 years, which works out to 5,175 days, or 15.6 years.
Until you're 20 or so, you're being told what to do all
the time. If it's not parents, it's teachers or gang
leaders giving the orders. It could be a college dean
telling you not to make an inappropriate finger gesture
when some enlightened person told you not to say fat
but temporarily cellulite advantaged.
Then you escape that by going out on your own and
getting a job. If you start working at age 20, then until
you are 35.6 years old, you get nothing for your work --
taxes take it all. If you are forced to work without pay,
or you must heed orders on penalty of starvation or
imprisonment, then you must be in a condition known as
slavery
or involuntary servitude.
Those conditions now exist for 35.6 years of the average American's life. Back when slave markets operated openly in this country, the average life-expectancy of a slave was about 30 years. (That is a guess. The oldest data I could find were from 1900, when a black child's life-expectancy at birth was 33.8 years. Conditions must have been worse a half-century earlier and 30 seems a reasonable estimate.)
So in 1850, when slavery was legal, the average time that a slave spent in servitude was 30 years. Then came the bloodiest war in American history -- the Civil War, which resulted in more casualties than all other American wars put together. At that tremendous cost, slavery was eliminated from our soil.
But in the enlightened year of 1991, the time the average American spends in servitude is 35.6 years, and this covers 100 percent of the labor force. In 1850, slavery lasted only 30 years, and affected only 24 percent of the labor force.
This may be progress, since we now have equal-opportunity indenture that affects everyone, regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.
But I can't escape the suspicion that Simon Legree went into government after he lost his plantation.
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