Bill Maher said something stupid again. (When does he not?) This time he claims that Rick Santorum homeschools because he wants to keep his kids in a “Christian madrassa”. Tina Korbe does a pretty good job ripping Maher apart but I want to share a couple of reasons why we homeschool. No one on the Left will care because I’m an evil, Right-wing, Mormon, Tea Partier but maybe it will help someone else understand why some people homeschool.

So many posts like this begin with the tired “I was opposed to it before I tried it” thing. This one does, too. My wife and I didn’t make the decision to homeschool lightly though she liked the idea. The person who got us to homeschool was my then-three year old daughter (whom I shall call R).

It was, as I said, three but rapidly closing in on her fourth birthday. My wife and I had talked a various times about what to do for schooling for our kids. The dilemma was that the local schools here sucked. (I used past tense here but the schools aren’t that much better today.)

I had a friend who worked in the local school district and was frequently in classrooms of various grades. He told me several times that if he hadn’t know ahead of time, he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between the kindergarten and first grade classes. They were learning nearly identical things. Namely, the alphabet, numbers, etc. That pretty well jived with the rumor that had reached us that the local schools didn’t teach reading until second grade.

Appalled, we started looking at other options. Unfortunately, those were limited. There was a private school but from what we heard, it wasn’t much better. (Yes, a private school. It’s one of the drawbacks of small town living.) My wife brought up homeschooling but, as I said before, I was not excited about the idea.

We hadn’t gotten much closer to and decision when R, rapidly approaching her fourth birthday, came to my wife and said, “Mom, teach me to read.” How do you say “no” to that? We had been do the basics like reading with her (her favorite book was “Horton Hatches the Egg” which my wife and I both had memorized by that time), singing the Alphabet Song and little counting games. Apparently, that wasn’t enough for R so my wife put together a rough lesson plan and started teaching her in earnest.

Typically, my wife would spend 30 minutes to an hour per day teaching her. After a year, she was reading simple books, knew her colors and was counting and doing basic addition and subtraction. Our other daughter, C, though more than a year younger, would often sit in on the lessons and was starting to learn a lot of that, too. I was impressed with the results.

Remember that five is about the age that kids start kindergarten. However, R’s birthday was late enough in the year that she wouldn’t be allowed to start for another year. So, we homeschooled for another year.

By the time that year was done R was starting into third grade level material. Think about that a minute. R was nearly six and would have been going into kindergarten. If we had enrolled her in the local school, should would spend three years learning what she already knew. I had a hard time justifying wasting three years of her life. Besides, she was making wonderful progress at home and I saw no need to stop that.

I had one reservation and that was “socialization”. That’s the argument that always gets used because, in general, homeschool opponents can’t win based on academic performance. I didn’t want to lock my kids away from society. We found other ways to solve that problem through church activities as well as dance, tae kwon do, scouts and other things. But … there’s a reason I used scare quotes around socialization.

You see, I’m a geek. I freely admit it. Heck, my nick includes the name of my favorite programming language. (Perl, if it wasn’t obvious.) Unfortunately, being a geek in school was not a recipe for having a joyful time at school. I loved to learn. Heck, I still do but it would have been a lot more enjoyable if there were no other students there. For much of my time from forth or fifth grade on, I could count the number of friends I had on one hand and, more often, on one finger. Except for the trench coat, I was your prototypical Columbine-style high school shooter. I wasn’t the only one.

After the shooting at Columbine, Slashdot ran a series of posts called “Voices from the Hellmouth”. The series showed very clearly the type of “socialization” that I and others like me had to deal with. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) My wife had a similar experience with school. Neither of us wanted our kids to deal with the type of “socialization” that we both had to deal with.

Even today, kids are ridiculed if they don’t fit the social norms. On of C’s friends was over for her birthday party and they were playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While they were playing, her friend said that wanted to play as Sonic the Hedgehog but that she wasn’t supposed to like Sonic because everyone at school said that Sonic is “for boys.” I don’t want my kids to turn away from their interests just because their classmates don’t like it.

As they got older and the material was harder for us to effectively teach, we (meaning my wife) did a lot of research and we enrolled them in a promising online program that allows them to advance as fast as they want. Today, R and C are excelling. Their percentiles are in the high 80′s and 90′s on their standardized tests and they are both on track to graduate a couple of years early.

Notice that nowhere in these ramblings did I mention religion though our faith is very important to us. That’s not why we chose to homeschool. We were going to teach our kids our faith through Church, example and regular family scripture study and we do. The fact that we can talk about religion in school is a benefit but it wasn’t a requirement. (There are parts of the New Testament that make a lot more sense when you understand the history of Rome.)

For us, the choice to homeschool was about academics and a desire to spare our children from the hell we both went though in school. It’s not for everyone though I strongly feel that most students would benefit from the online model, even in a classroom setting. People like Maher that continue to spread these lies about homeschooling are doing our nation and homeschoolers everywhere a huge disservice just so that he can score a few brownie points with ignorant Leftists.

(Originally posted at PerlStalker’s Ramblings.)

Texas has become the latest state to look at a taxing Internet sales. Colorado’s own “Amazon tax” has been ruled unconstitutional as is currently under injunction while the courts sort things out. Texas, Colorado and all of the other states that have attempted to enforce an online sales tax have the same problem. Sales tax revenue is falling. All of this got me thinking, is it time to eliminate the sales tax?

Sales taxes are a great source of revenue for states and local governments. It doesn’t matter who is shopping at the stores in town, the town gets a bit of tax revenue from them. The county and state usually get a cut as well. The taxes are easy to collect and generally stay where they are collected. As an added bonus, the taxes are anonymous. The governments don’t need to collect all sorts of personal information in order to collect the taxes. That also means that money gained through illegal channels and spent in town also gets taxed.

The next issue is that having both an income tax and a sales tax amounts to double taxation. You see, you’re taxed once on your income, then you’re taxed again on the money you have left over every time you buy something. One or the other is fine but not both.

All of those are great reasons to support sales taxes and partly why the Fair Tax is so popular but there’s a problem with the tax that may be the Achilles Heel of the system. That problem is the increased mobility of consumers. That mobility comes in two forms, shoppers heading out of town to make their purchases and those who simply hit up Amazon, Barnes and Noble or any of the zillion other online retailers.

You see, if a city raises its sales tax too high, a lot of the residents will take their shopping dollars elsewhere. Oh, not for everything certainly, but large purchases will almost exclusively happen out-of-town or online. Cities, counties and states that raise their sales taxes will see more and more of their sales tax revenues disappear as their citizens do their shopping elsewhere.

The greater ability to shop outside one’s locality makes sales tax collection problematic. Not that they haven’t tried. Colorado, for example, requires that everyone who makes a purchase online must calculate their own tax burden and send it to the state. That process is just as exciting as it sounds. Take a look at Ari Armstrong’s experience trying to pay his use tax. It isn’t pretty. In fact, so few people pay the tax that Colorado hardly enforces it.

I understand the arguments in favor of sales taxes. I would love to see either sales tax or income tax eliminated. Given the practicalities, I’m beginning to think the sales tax should be the tax to end.

Originally posted at PerlStalker’s Ramblings.

Bullying has always been a problem in schools for those who are different. Every year or so there are stories of bullies gone too far or victims who violently and indiscriminately fight back. One of the most dramatic in recent memory was the Columbine massacre where two very disturbed young men shot and killed a dozen of their classmates.

Events such as Columbine or the recent bully body slam video bring bullying back into our collective consciousness. Inevitably, some well meaning person will try to stop it and, just as inevitably, it will lead to an overreaction that is dangerous to students and the community.

After Columbine, much of the bullying suffered by so called geeks came at the hands of school administrators. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

In the days after the Littleton, Colorado massacre on April 20, 1999, the country went on a panicked hunt for the oddballs in high school, a profoundly ignorant and unthinking response to a tragedy that left geeks, nerds, non-conformists and the alienated in an even worse situation than they were before. Stories emerged from all over the country about these witch-hunts, which amounted to little more than Geek Profiling. These voiceless kids-invisible in media and on TV talk shows and powerless in their own schools-have been e-mailing me with stories of what has happened to them in the past few days. What follows are some of those stories in their own words, with my gratitude and admiration for the courage it took in sending them. The big story out of Littleton isn’t about violence on the Internet; it isn’t about video games turning our kids into killers. It’s about the fact that for some of the best, brightest and most interesting school kids, high school is a nightmare of exclusion, cruelty, loneliness, warped values and rage. In short, high school is the Hellmouth.

Representative Jackie Speier is proposing another overreaction. Rep. Speier is proposing that every case of bullying in school become a Federal offense. That’s right, if someone is accused of bullying, it must go to the Feds as part of a “zero tolerance” environment. Unfortunately, zero tolerance equals zero thought more often than not. Combined with the heavy hand of the Federal government, that’s a dangerous combination.

Should bullying be stopped? Absolutely, though it is impossible to stop completely. But the decision of how to deal with lies with the people who work with those kids every day, not with a faceless Federal bureaucrat.

(Originally posted at PerlStalker’s Ramblings.)

With teen pregnancy rates dropping all over the country, in Pueblo, Colorado, rates continue to rise. The Pueblo Chieftain lists three possible reasons in their opening paragraph.

When a survey team starts looking for the reasons so many teenage girls in Pueblo become mothers, the most likely reason will be that it’s a family tradition, a symptom of poverty and absent fathers.

Family tradition is the hardest thing to change. “Hey, my mother had me as a teen so I’ll be okay.” Except, these days it’s often the mother and grandmother. Add to that a culture that accepts and, dare I say it, expects that single teens will get pregnant and you have a serious problem that is difficult for young women to get out of.

“Wait a minute,” I hear you cry. “Expects single teens will get pregnant?” Aye. That’s the “symptom of poverty” the Chieftain mentions. When you have a community where the majority of mothers are of the unwed teen variety, there is an expectation in the community that unwed teens will become pregnant. It’s just like in communities where the majority of mothers are of the married (teen or otherwise) variety, there’s an expectation that women will get married first.

There’s a problem with the “symptom of poverty” theory. In short, they have their causation reversed. Unwed teen mothers tend to be poor mostly because they drop out of school to rear their children. If a young woman can get out of school without getting pregnant, she has a much better chance of going to college and getting a good job.

Before you scream about a lack of money, assuming her grades were reasonably good, there is enough financial aid available for her to go to college. It will probably be a smaller state college and not MIT or Harvard but she’ll be able to get the education she needs to get started.

There’s a plethora of documentation on the importance of having a father in the home so I won’t dwell on that much beyond this. A married couple provides an example for their children to emulate. As I said before, in communities where the majority of families consist of married couples, there is an expectation that the children will also get married.

This quote from later in the article is key though.

Aragon said there was another factor: Her dad was there and she grew up in a stable family.

“Men took responsibility and I don’t see that happening today.”

Wait, men need to take responsibility? What a concept! But it doesn’t go far enough. Women, especially, need to take responsibility for getting pregnant. Not to let men off the hook because, the last time I checked, it takes two to get pregnant, but the man doesn’t get stuck with the kid.

“See? That’s why we need cheep and accessible abortions,” the feminists will point out with exuberance. They’re wrong, despite their exuberance. What is needed is for young women to realize that having sex is what gets them pregnant. It’s not rocket science. If an unwed teen doesn’t want to get pregnant, she shouldn’t have sex. No birth control is perfect and women get pregnant even when using birth control. Except for that Mary chick in Bethlehem, no women has ever gotten pregnant by not having sex.

So, there’s the message that needs to taught. If you don’t want to get pregnant, don’t have sex. It doesn’t matter how much you like the guy, if you don’t want to get pregnant, don’t have sex.

(Originally posted at PerlStalker’s Ramblings)

Over the years, I’ve heard a number of people on the Left claim that they support big government because they don’t like the amount of control corporations have on them or the country. I got to thinking about that the other day and started looking at how a corporation can have control over a person’s life. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the reason corporations have as much control as they have, is primarily due to having a powerful central government. Let’s break it down a bit and I’ll try to show you what I mean.

There are a handful of ways that a corporation can exert some sort of control on a person. The first is so obvious that it’s often overlooked: A person buy’s a product or service from the corporation. If a person buys a thing, say a can of tuna, there’s almost no tie between the person or the company. For something larger, a drill for instance, there might be a warrantee that places a limit on the person. For example, it might limit the time that the person can get free repairs from the corporation if the drill is defective or prevent the person from suing the corporation because the person decided to drill a hole in their head.

In the case of a service, things get a little more complicated. Usually, there is some sort of contract or usage agreement that a person must agree to in order to use the service. The agreement puts limits on both parties. In effect, the corporation has control over one aspect of the person’s life, specifically in regards to that person’s use of the service.

In nearly all cases, the control the corporation has over a person is the direct result of a person’s actions. If John signs up with Facebook, he’s bound by their usage agreement. However, John has a very simple solution to avoid giving up that control. He can choose not to use the service.

People can go around and around over whether or not a corporation’s policies are “fair” but, in the end, it’s up to the person to decide if they want to use the service. If John doesn’t want to be bound by Facebook’s policies, he can choose not to sign-up and Facebook has no control over him. (Okay, that’s not entirely true but we’ll get to that in a minute.)

In general, this type of control, i.e. the limits placed on people and corporations because of free will decisions is harmless to society. People can complain all they want about privacy policies or warrantees but, in the end, it’s the person’s decision to submit to that control. No corporation can force a person to buy their products or use their services on their own.

The second way corporations can control a person is through the law. The two most obvious examples are copyright and patents. This is where that other Facebook restriction comes in. Those two systems of law place restrictions on a person whether or not they are buying something from the corporation or have even heard of the corporation. That’s especially true with patents where a person can invent a better mouse trap but can be prevented from profiting from if if a corporation has patented the idea that the inventor used even if the person developed the idea independently. It gets even more exciting when a company tries to tell you that you don’t actually own that DVD you bought and, therefore, can only play it in approved players.

Oh, and what have the big corporations been doing when a competitor shows up? They certainly haven’t been trying to compete in the market. They’ve been trying to sue each other out of existence. It’s even more exciting in the case of UPS and FedEx. UPS feels that it’s has a competitive disadvantage because FedEx isn’t unionized and they are. They’ve been trying to get Congress to force FedEx to unionize.

Do you see where the problems are, yet? Almost all of the problems that people complain about with corporations are due to legal loopholes or government meddling. Why do you think corporations and unions give huge amounts of cash to politicians? It isn’t because they like them. It’s because the corporations want legislation passed that gives them a competitive advantage.

Let’s take a look at the music and movie industries. The music industry, especially, was completely blindsided by the Internet. They fought for years to prevent any company from selling digital copies of their music online. In order to protect a failing business model, the RIAA and MPAA didn’t change what they were doing to fit the needs of their customers. Instead, they went running to Congress. UPS did the same thing.

Government’s role in the market should be extremely small. Mainly, they need to ensure that contracts are upheld and keep people and corporations honest. That’s no longer the case in the United States. Now we have a Federal government that aids corporations and unions based on who gives them the biggest bribe, er, campaign donation. If the government didn’t have the power to benefit those donors, the money wouldn’t be spent in the first place. It’s only through the rapidly expanding power of government that the corporate corruption and control that those on the Left so desperately campaign against comes to pass.

The Leftist will argue that a strong, powerful government is necessary to keep corporations out of politics. Instead, it provides more and more reason for corporations to get involved. If everyone if government were completely altruistic, they might be right. Of course, if everyone in government were completely altruistic, we wouldn’t have this problem.

The Framers of the Constitution built an extremely limited government because they knew that power corrupts the most honest of men. With a limited government, even with huge bribes and unadulterated corruption, there is little corrupt politician can do and there’s little reason for any corporation or union to spend the money. The corporations lose the controls that those on the Left deride.

In short, the Left has cause and effect exactly reversed. Corporate control isn’t stopped by a powerful government; it’s encouraged by it. If you truly want to end the expanse of corporate control, you must kill off it’s symbiotic partner, big government.

Welcome to the Tea Party, my friends. We’re glad to have you.

(Originally posted at PerlStalker’s Ramblings.)

Well, my friends, it has come down to this. Tomorrow is the day we start restoring our liberties. But Election Day is just the start of the process. After the victory parties end and we all sleep off a well earned celebration, it’s back to work. What we do over the next few months will set the ground work heading into 2012.

I keep hearing that the Tea Parties are going to fizzle out. That they’re temporary. Nothing could be further from the truth. We will not relent. Obama and his Leftist cronies have woken the sleeping giant. It doesn’t end with them. We have to make sure that we hold Republicans accountable as well. We will not settle for business as usual anymore. We elected them and we will throw them out if they don’t stand up for limited, Constitutional government.

We have a long way to go. Remember, it was three long years after the Boston Tea Party that a small group of men pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. The fight didn’t stop in Boston’s Harbor, at Lexington or at Valley Forge and it will not stop this day. It is time for us to stand with our brethren in Liberty and cry with one voice “LIBERTY OR DEATH!”

(Originally posted at PerlStalker’s Ramblings.)

Obama’s government wants to be able to monitor all Internet communication and it is ready and willing to mandate that all encryption software, including peer-to-peer apps, have a backdoor so that the government can decrypt the traffic.

The New York Times reported this morning on a Federal government plan to put government-mandated back doors in all communications systems, including all encryption software. The Times said the Obama administration is drafting a law that would impose a new “mandate” that all communications services be “able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages” — including ordering “[d]evelopers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication [to] redesign their service to allow interception”.

And we all know that no one but the government will be able to use the backdoor. I mean, it’s not like there are groups of people working to break the security systems of public and private networks. The fact is, any weakness in a security protocol will eventually be exploited. It just a matter of time. Heck, even my most tech illiterate wife recognizes that fact.

Let’s just look at the technical problems of this before we get into the even nastier legal issues. First of all, from my sarcastic rant above, there is no way any cryptographic backdoor will remain in the sole possession of the government. There are too many skilled hackers and crackers out there for such a hole to remain secret for long; especially when they know the hole is there.

Take a minute and think about all the times you use encryption during the day. You use it when you log in to most web sites. You use it when you purchase products over the Internet. Corporate users will almost certainly use encryption when they send or receive email. Like most systems administrators, I use it to securely log into the servers I maintain so that I can manage those systems.

What happens if someone breaks any of those things? Think your Facebook or Twitter credentials are unimportant? A second worm has hit Twitter this week. Worms and other malware can not only steal your private information, compromised machines are often used to launch attacks against other systems or provide hosting for pornography, including child porn, and additional malware. If your Facebook account gets hacked, all of your friends are at risk of being compromised. Then, of course, there’s useless information like your bank and credit card numbers.

All of that information is vulnerable the minute you introduce a designed weakness into the encryption system.

Then there’s the nasty civil rights issues. What does it do to a person’s right to free speech when they know that any communication they can be read by the government … or their ex-girlfriend. Encryption is just one tool that can be used to defend our Liberty and the Obama administration wants to take that away from us.

This isn’t the first time either. I remember the case of Phil Zimmermann and his app Pretty Good Privacy. The government tried to shut him down and eventually dropped all charges. These days, PGP and the various open source implementations of the PGP encryption standard have become the de facto tool to encrypt email messages. There are even simple to use plugins, such as Enigmail, for email apps like Thunderbird.

Call your Congressmen and the President’s office and tell them that their encroachment on our rights must stop.

(Originally posted at PerlStalker’s Ramblings.)

Tabitha Hale shared an excellent post by Steven Crowder about sex or rather not having sex.

The idea of abstinence has become somewhat of a punchline in this country. From the myth of unrealistic “abstinence only” education, to the media’s constant portrayal (and mockery) of young, nerdy, out of touch Christians riddled with chastity pendants, the message on abstinence being pumped through pop-culture is clear; If you’re abstinent it’s either because A) you’re ugly or B) you’re a loser. In my case, it was often both.

Mine, too.

Sure, Michelle Obama can run around the country and condemn little fatties for inhaling Little Debbies, but if you try and apply that same helpful, healthful concept to sex, it’s seen as pushy and/or prudish.

It’s even more fun when people rail against obesity because of the increased burden fat people place on a taxed (in more ways than one) health care system. Yet those same people encourage sexual promiscuity which leads to the spread of diseases which, in many cases, have no cure and put an even greater strain on the health care system. That doesn’t even take into account the number of single mothers who end up on welfare further burdening a system already stretched to the limit.

Listen, one doesn’t need to be religious (nor a rocket scientist) to see the value of abstinence. Let’s disregard the immediately eliminated risk of increasingly popular STD’ and STI’s. Heck, let’s even discount the statistical data showing that sexual exclusivity seems overwhelmingly conducive to a successful marriage .Abstinence also provides an incomparable bond of trust in a relationship.

…

I can tell you beyond any doubt, that my lady is able to control herself and stick to her values regardless of circumstance. Just as surely, she can say the same about me (Ben&Jerry’s benders notwithstanding). It is that display of self-control, that tangible example of living your principles through your life’s walk that ensures her that I won’t be jumping on the first well-proportioned opportunity that comes my way.

Wait, a relationship based on trust? Can those even exist? Not if you get all of your information from TV sitcoms. They will often glorify sex and use the lack of trust and the jealousy of the characters for cheap laughs.

In the sitcom Friends, two of the characters, Ross and Rachel, started dating and, as was common on that show, having sex. During a troubled time in their relationship, Rachel suggests that they “take a break from us.” Ross was so distraught that he ends up in the arms of another woman. When Rachel reconsiders the breakup the next but learns of Ross’ indiscretion and things go rapidly downhill. Ross’ exclamation “We were on a break!” becomes a running gag throughout the rest of the show.

This example from the 1990′s is tame compared to shows such as Sex and the City or True Blood.

Strong trust is the result. Constantly we hear cries of women aimed at their supposedly overly jealous boyfriends, “What’s the matter? Don’t you trust me?”

No, he doesn’t. You slept with him on the first date and there is no reason for him to think that you wouldn’t do the same when a better offer comes along.

It doesn’t help that nearly every show on TV glorifies infidelity and distrust. The common phrase “You are what you eat” can be restated “You are what you watch.”

Crowder finally asks the question that few seem to want to ask.

While we’re on the subject, has the whole floozie shtick really empowered any women out there?

What it has empowered is growth in the number of single mothers, broken homes and the murder of the unborn.

We live in an age where school administrators are not asking whether schools should be encouraging sex but how young to start encouraging sex. The whole idea of promoting abstinence among children, as Crowder so bluntly puts it, “makes people’s posteriors pucker with discomfort.”

Schools freely hand out condoms, which, at best, have a 15 percent failure rate, to students and are somehow surprised when many of those students turn up pregnant. Do you think these same administrators would encourage their students to drive knowing their brakes would fail 15 percent of the time? Of course not.

It’s long since time that we honestly talk about abstinence. Not because sex is “evil” or “wrong” because it’s not but because there are legitimate reasons to wait.

(Originally posted at PerlStalker’s Ramblings)

Colorado is facing a $257 million shortfall for the 2010-2011 fiscal year. And that’s the good news. According to Colorado’s official Economic and Revenue Forecast, the deficit could be has high as $1.1 billion.

Tax revenues are expected to go up over the next few years but they aren’t going to be enough to cover all of the spending happening at the state level. For all those TABOR haters out there, you should know that TABOR is not restricting the revenues that the state can take in.

Lame duck Governor Bill Ritter has issued a statement on the economic forecast.

Today’s forecasts are a clear reminder that Colorado’s economic recovery is not nearly as robust as Coloradans want or need. Economic growth remains volatile and sluggish, and Colorado families and businesses are not yet seeing healthy, sustainable or certain growth in their bottom lines, while government agencies also continue to face difficult budgets.

It doesn’t help that state Democrats have done their best to kill the state economy through a series of tax hikes new fees. Add to that all of the uncertainty caused by ObamaCare and Congressional Democrats and it’s a recipe for economic disaster.

We will do what we can to minimize pain and protect essential services. We’ll continue to employ a strategy of shared sacrifice and solutions, and we are going to remain aggressive about economic development so Colorado is well-positioned for a strong, sustainable and healthy recovery.

Here’s a idea. How about eliminating all of the grants Colorado has been awarding? When you’re broke, you can’t go around giving away money you don’t have. Of course, the state would have already made a lot of the necessary cuts if they hadn’t been depending on $550 million in one-time cash from the Federal government.

Governor Ritter will announce his proposed cuts by the end of October. The catch is, it will be another governor overseeing the budget process when the state Assembly reconvenes in January.

The full report is embedded below.

Colorado Economic and Revenue Forecast Sept 2010

(Originally posted at PerlStalker’s Ramblings.)

Ari Armstrong passes along this perfect example of the liberal mentality. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is suggesting that all employee paychecks be sent to the UK tax collection agency. The agency will then send whatever is left after taking their cut to the employees.

This proposal makes the assumption that money earned by UK workers belongs to the state first. It’s only after they have confiscated what they feel you owe that they will give you your money. Think of the fun UK taxpayers will have the first time there’s an error and they get no money back from the previous week’s check.

It should be noted that the American Income Tax works on the same principle. Unless an employee chooses to claim no withholdings, the government takes their share before the person who earned that money gets it. Even if the employee chooses not to have income taxes withheld, he still has Social Security and Medicaid taxes taken from his check.

You know that refund that everyone looks forward to after they file their taxes? In most cases, that’s not a gift from our benevolent overlords. It’s repayment of the interest free loan that you’ve give the government because they took too much of your money out of every pay check. It’s like me telling you that you own me $15 but I’m going to take $20. Eventually, I’ll give you the $5 back but, until then, you’re still out that five bucks.

A better system would be the Fair Tax. Everyone pays taxes based on how much they spend, not how much they earn. You can even exempt groceries and fuel from the Fair Tax if you want to reduce the burden on the exceptionally poor. In the end, it means that the money you earn is yours and yours alone not what the government allows you to keep.

(Originally posted at PerlStalker’s Ramblings.)