In the mail yesterday I received a letter from the IRS, regarding the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008. Here is a quote of the first paragraph of this letter :

Dear Taxpayer,
We are please to inform you that the United States Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which provides for economic stimulus payments to be made to over 130 million American households. Under this new law, you may be entitled to a payment of up to $600 ($1,00 if filing a joint return), plus additional amounts for each qualifying child.

That sounds pretty cool, right? An extra $600 isn’t really going to stimulate me to make any purchases, but I’m definitely not going to say no to it. Oh wait, maybe I have to. Here’s a quote from the bottom of the letter :

For taxpayers with adjusted gross income (AGI) of more than $75,000 (or more than $150,000 if married filing jointly), the payment will be reduced or phased out completely).

They might as well have replaced that line with :

If you’re successful at all, you don’t deserve anything. We’d rather give it to individuals that make $3,000 a year and would stimulate our economy by spending the $600 on drug money.

Honestly…what is it with the U.S. government hating on successful people? I understand that those who have a much lower income could use the money to pay off debt or whatever, and $600 isn’t enough to save me maybe pay off 0.01% of my taxes. Really though, it seems like our government does a swell job at trying to reward those who haven’t accomplished much in their life. Maybe it’s not that, maybe it just seems like the government does a swell job at penalizing wealthy individuals for their success.

It is absolutely absurd how much of a higher percentage the rich pay in taxes. People look down upon the saying “the rich will get richer”. That quote is completely true, and that’s what should happen. If someone has the drive, motivation, and guts to take a risk and start their own company, then more power to them when they succeed. People shouldn’t cry because they chose to go to college and chose to work a 9-5 job in a cubicle for the rest of their life.

The argument against this is “well how many rich people out there are rich from just scamming and lying?” Ok, how many in the middle/lower class scam/cheat/lie/sell drugs just to put food on the table and nothing more? Plenty. There’s rotten fruit on every tree, that doesn’t mean you should chop down the entire tree.

This “economic stimulus” plan is just more icing on the cake. Let’s give money to those making less than $75,000 gross per year, and to the successful let’s just keep taxing the hell out of them. For those of you who are uninformed or are just getting into the world of self-employment, here are what federal tax rates look like :

A person who has a highly successful business ($349,700 income) is paying 25% more in taxes than somebody with an unsuccessful business. The government punishes the successful by taking over 1/3 of their profits. This isn’t even counting state tax, so let’s jack it up even higher.

ABSOLUTELY ABSURD.

Every single time I think about it, I get sick to my stomach. If a person is paying more, they’re naturally going to be paying a lot more in taxes even with a fixed percentage. Someone making $10,000 would pay $1,500 in taxes, while someone making $500,000 would pay $75,000. That’s still 50x as much. But the government likes to take advantage of the successful and jack the metric up to 116x as much, $175,000 in taxes. I would say that’s the biggest negative when entering into the lucrative world of online business.

All in all, this post was one big rant about the government, and if you’re anything like me (pretty much if you’re making money online in the US), you can understand my feelings on the subject.

Let’s go lose some money fellas, we’ll get $600 for it.

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