RSSInterview With J.J. Jackson – Author of “Here Hangs Lady Liberty” Part 2
RonniesRayGun | January 31, 2010
This is the next part of the interview transcript. To read part 1 go here. There is more to come after this one too.
RRG: What did you most hope to accomplish by writing this pamphlet?
J.J. Jackson: Education. It is all about knowledge. And when you read it I do not think that you can come away not thinking that something is really wrong with the way our government operates and spends taxpayer dollars. Education is always the first step.
RRG: Do you think that it is going to be hard to convince people that a more limited government is better?
J.J. Jackson: No, I do not think that it is hard to convince them of that. Poll after poll by legitimate polling firms show that the American people think that government should be smaller and tax and spend less. The problem? The problem is getting each individual American to accept that their piece of the unconstitutional pie also needs to be done away with and actually embrace more limited government in practice. Lots of people say that they want limited government but when it comes to the practice of what they preach they fall short. They circle the wagons around whatever program they are benefiting from. Seniors are often very conservative, but most would gouge your eyes out in a second if you even looked at their Social Security checks funny.
RRG: So the biggest problem is hypocrisy?
J.J. Jackson: Not just hypocrisy Ron. It’s complicated but oh so very simple at the same time. It is simple, again if I can return to my example of seniors and Social Security, that such a program is wholly extra constitutional and beyond the power of our government to administer. There is no question, regardless of the spin and the dodging when liberals are confronted on the issue, that it is unconstitutional. But you have also had Americans forced, literally at gun point, to contribute their own dollars earned when they were younger to pay the way of the seniors before them. Lots of people justify the program and their own demands that it continues for them based on the fact that this previous wrong occurred. So they want the wrong to continue now simply to benefit themselves. They think they are owed it and that it is right for them to get back what others took from them by forcibly taking from yet a third group.
It is really sick. Sort of like saying that because we once enslaved people from Africa that we should keep enslaving people from Africa today. It is a ridiculous argument. But they still make it.
I don’t disagree that they have a right to have their money given back to them. What I disagree with is their presumption that others should be taxed today to make that so.
RRG: Ok, let me ask you this then. You are President. I’m making you President. What do you do about this problem?
J.J. Jackson: First, can I decline to accept the position?
RRG: *Laughs* No.
J.J. Jackson: Ok then, hypothetically let’s say that I am President. And let’s say I am not assassinated by the time I take office.
RRG: Possibly a big IF!
J.J. Jackson: Tell me about it! I would accept one of a couple options. The first of these I admit however is problematic Constitutionally just like the current situation is but I think would still make a huge improvement in the situation. What I would suggest, as the first option, is that on a federal level the entire bureaucracy for programs like Social Security be dismantled. The responsibility for programs like this that are unconstitutional federally should be shifted to the states completely. Then if they want to tax their younger workers to provide money for the retirement of their Senior Citizens then that should be a state by state choice. They can pick the tax level and they can choose the level of benefits. Do the same for Welfare and all other federal social programs.
Now, there is a problem with this. That is that I think it is at best borderline unconstitutional like I said. The 14th Amendment prohibits states from infringing on the rights of the citizens and places the same restrictions on them as the federal government has. For example, because of the 14th Amendment states are not allowed to violate the free speech rights of their own citizens or prevent them from keeping and bearing arms except as punishment for a crime for which they have been duly convicted and for which such punishments might be valid. But as President, my role would be management of the federal government. Each state would have to fight this battle internally and I would support the states from the side that it is unconstitutional. What each state would be doing, in essence, is taxing one of its citizens for the expressed benefit of others and that violates what I think is obvious is the equal protection provisions of the Constitution.
Now there is also a huge logistical problem to contend with which would cause the states to rise up against such a plan and reject it I think. Some states would undoubtedly choose to not carry on such programs. Others would most certainly keep them. The states that chose to end them and not tax the workers to pay for these programs would be magnets for workers, industry and jobs. The states that kept such programs would be magnets for those that want the benefits. Obviously you can see how quickly there would be an imbalance in the ability of states choosing to keep such programs to collect funds and pay out promises in the later. What young, vibrant worker, given a choice, would live in a state that would tax them to pay someone else’s way? Taxes that would undoubtedly get higher as more and more flocked in to take advantage of the benefits? Very few I would bet.
It goes back to the state by state experiment concept that originally existed at the founding of this nation. Let the states with the best ideas thrive and let those with the worst fail, crash and burn and then copy the successful and succeed themselves. But we have to get the whole thing out of the federal bureaucracy first and foremost. This plan is a baby step by baby step plan.
All this leads me to the second option. Kill the programs completely. Stop funding them. Stop taxing for them. Go cold turkey. Don’t even give the states the option to take them over. Yeah, some people will suffer. But people are suffering now too because they are having money stripped from their paychecks to pay someone else’s way. I have no doubt that overnight charities would pop up left and right to help these folks that no longer have their government safety net.
Yes, I actually do have faith in the American people when it comes to that.
RRG: Ok, you know I have to play liberal advocate here. Isn’t that last option cruel?
J.J. Jackson: More cruel than literally enslaving a worker to pay the expenses of another who either is not or did not care enough for their own life and expected someone else to carry them across the finish line? More cruel than threatening to throw Americans in jail if they do not agree to have their earning stripped to pay for any of the various social programs in existence? That’s what we have now and it is far too close to a Stalinist, Maoist, Hitlarian state for my liking.
Uh oh, I can see the liberals cringing at those comparisons. Tough. It is the God’s honest truth.
RRG: Do you think such ideas like those you just talked about will every gain enough widespread support to end this sort of action?
J.J. Jackson: Nope. Too many people have been conditioned like Pavlov’s Dog to salivate at the bell which is government taxing someone else to line their pockets. But I will still make sure that the truth is told about these programs. Too many people claim to be fiscally conservative and that they want smaller government with fewer services. But only so long as the services that are cut are not the ones that benefit them. I meet elderly folks all the time that rail against Welfare and talk about how it should be ended. But as soon as I ask if they feel the same about Social Security they go ballistic complaining about how they paid into the system and “deserve” the benefits now being paid for by others. There is a serious need for a major reality check for a lot of people before we can solve the real problems with spending and taxing in this country. Our yearly budget consists of so much welfare spending that we will never get back in the black without cutting it and cutting it drastically.
Short of an all out revolution with guns being fired or an all out or near all out collapse of the American economy due to renegade and unsustainable spending things will not change much. We are getting closer to the later every day with our huge deficits where much of our spending is borrowing to appease our existing creditors. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent each year just to pay last year’s debts. You cannot keep doing that as anyone with a credit card knows. It’s a shame that America has to be literally destroyed in order to save it.
RRG: Ok, so you’re still President, I haven’t taken that away from you yet, what do you do?
J.J. Jackson: I order the tax collectors to stop collecting the taxes that are paying for these things. I order the government lawyers to stop prosecuting those that do not pay the taxes that are ordered to no longer be collected. I order every Executive Branch agency which hands out these tax dollars to be shuttered and to cease acting. If states want to take over the programs individually they can but no more from the federal level.
RRG: You are referring to all taxes?
J.J. Jackson: No, just those being paid for unconstitutional purposes. SSI, Medicare, etc. See, the Congress thinks that it can just pass any unconstitutional law it wants and tax to fund it. Of course I completely debunk this notion in “Here Hangs Lady Liberty.” But the sworn oath of the Presidency requires the man or woman holding that office to uphold the Constitution – not the laws of Congress that are unconstitutional and which are invalid based on their unconstitutionality. I have been yelling about this for years where Presidents who claim to be conservative and fiscally so, such as Reagan and Bush, sit around and let Congress just bully them into spending money unconstitutionally.
You are President for God’s sake! You control the agencies that Congress creates to step on the liberties of the American people! Grow some nuts and put a stop to it! That’s what I say.
RRG: Any chance of another option for solving the problem of unconstitutional welfare spending?
J.J. Jackson: The third way? Considering that we have talked about this in the past I figured you would bring that up and put me on the record. Yes, I guess there is indeed a final option that I would accept as well and it hinges on the concept of the FairTax which is a national retail sales tax.
Now, I know I will get excoriated by the hardcore libertarian right for this proposal but I have often said that compulsory taxes to pay for welfare spending is the biggest problem I have. The FairTax actually partially addresses this as well as other issues I have with the federal tax code. But disclaimer time: I do have my fair share of problems with the FairTax.
What the FairTax does well however is makes paying taxes optional, giving Americans a true form of protest against government spending while getting rid of all the hidden taxes that are rolled into the price of goods and services and putting them right up front for all Americans to see. My problems with it is that it is progressive; the poor pay no taxes and again that is the problem with America today – people that pay no income taxes voting themselves other people’s money. Sure they pay the hidden taxes but they don’t understand that. So they just keep voting themselves more of everyone else’s money.
As currently constituted, the FairTax is revenue neutral meaning it funds all the welfare programs we have at the moment. However it only applies to end users who buy new goods and services. This will allow the government to essentially repay the debt it has incurred to those it has lied to over the years while allowing the government to essentially stop putting more people on the Social Security and Welfare rolls. That is of course not the intention of the plan by the authors but it could be adapted to do such.
Once we have optional taxes, the liberals that love welfare programs can all buy new goods and pay the tax. Where as people who actually believe in the Constitution and limited government can by used goods and avoid the tax. The liberal that buys the new car pays the tax. When they trade it in in three years and it is a used car the American who doesn’t want to fund such programs can buy it used and avoid the tax. Combine this with a decision to stop adding new members to the rolls of these programs and tell Americans to start fending for themselves like they should be and taking personal responsibility and a constantly decreasing sales tax rate to account for the lower demand for money to repay money that government has stolen from the people and I think you have an amicable solution. Not the one I would prefer because I have a sneaking suspicion that liberals will never abide by such a plan and find ways to keep these programs going until the end of time. Hence my preference to just cut them off cold turkey, but like I said, it is an amicable solution that allows the liberals to put their money where their mouths are and keep funding these programs until all existing debts are repaid.
RRG: On that long note, I’d like to ask you some questions about current affairs if I may
J.J. Jackson: Of course.
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19 Responses to “Interview With J.J. Jackson – Author of “Here Hangs Lady Liberty” Part 2”
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I like the new-used car scenerios
This claim about choosing how much tax to pay is badly overblown. Services make up half of the typical family budget and there are no “used” services. There are no used groceries, no used restaurant meals, no used home heating oil/gas, no used petrol for the family buggy, nothing used at Wal-Mart, etc. etc. Almost everything in the lower income family budget will be taxed. The few exceptions would be occasional purchases of cars, boats, houses, etc.
More importantly, buying used won’t save any more cash under the Fairtax than is saved under current law. Think about it as the “embedded cost of the Fairtax”. Supply and demand will very quickly restore the new/used price relationship that exists today. Does anyone honestly believe that a buyer of a new car costing $30,000 plus tax ($36,900) is going to just forget about the $6900 sales tax? Buyers of used stuff will in effect be paying a share of the original sales tax.
While it is true that no revenue goes to the Feds when buying used, there won’t be any windfall cash savings. If you don’t frequent Goodwill today, there would be no reason to change your lifestyle under the Fairtax!
Mr. Van Gieson you are woefully misinformed about the FairTax as mentioned above. It does not apply up to the poverty line and on necessities of life. Thus your assertion that, “Almost everything in the lower income family budget will be taxed,” is patently false.
I do not know where you get your information about the FairTax but I would suggest that you educate yourself before running around and talking about what you think the plan would do when it is quite clear it is not.
Mr. Jackson seems very well versed on the tax, much more so than you do it seems. I agree with him that the plan is progressive because of the prebate system and personally I don’t like it.
And what is wrong with all citizens paying taxes regardless of income anyway? It leads, I think, to a populace as a whole that is worried about how Washington spends money. Unlike what we have today which I would say is a populace where a big portion of it cares not for how money is spent because they do not pay any direct taxes or so they think! Embedded taxes are the really killer of the U.S. economy.
Once more I say educate yourself before speaking. You do yourself a great disservice by looking foolish and talking without the facts.
J.J. has been talking about what is right with the FairTax and what is wrong with the FairTax for years. As long as I can remember. To say that he has forgotten more about that plan than Mr. Van Gieson ever knew about it to start with would be an oh so true statement.
What is annoying is that here you have a guy, J.J., talking about serious solutions to serious problems and then this guy comes in and lies through his teeth about a single part that he obviously has a bone to pick with. You wonder if he is a sitting around all day googling “FairTax” just to find comments and blog posts that he thinks he can comment on and spread his lies and get away with it.
Here that won’t be the case though. Too many educated people here.
There are haters and there are people who are seeking answers that the haters hate.
Personally I am for a flat income tax with no withholding. Make people write the check every quarter and get them pissed at uncle sam. But I know enough about the FairTax to know that the previous commenter is just a hater and doesn’t want the plan. Too many lies in one post not to be.
I encourage everyone to actally go to the FairTax website and read the plan for yourselves. Hank is a dimwit and obviously trying to lie about the plan for some reason
Thanks for the link Jenny! Going over there to check it out!
Yes, it is clear that Hank is not well versed at all on the Fair Tax. He is trying to scare people by saying things like, “Services make up half of the typical family budget and there are no “used” services,” to frighten people away from the plan. It is true the that the Fair Tax would indeed tax services where as right now there is not a direct federal tax on such things. But there is a hidden tax on services because companies pay Social Security, Medicare and Corporate Income Taxes – all these are rolled into the price of the services we buy currently. The Fair Tax replaces these hidden taxes and puts them out in the open.
I too do not understand Hank’s motives but this old attack on the Fair Tax has been tried since it was first proposed. It has also been refuted time and again and shown just as I have described above.
But hey, some people have their own agendas to push. I tend to not listen to people that lie. They don’t deserve it.
Hank is just trashing something he doesn’t like. No doubt he is an advocate of some other plan and even perhaps a lover of the current income tax in one form or another (progressive, flat or otherwise) that takes money right from the productivity of the working class.
Hey Trigger Mama, don’t know if you meant it as a joke or not when you said, “wonder if he is a sitting around all day googling “FairTax” just to find comments and blog posts that he thinks he can comment on and spread his lies and get away with it.” But believe it or not there are just those poor types of souls aplenty on the internet who do nothing but see what they can get away with.
And believe it or not the FairTax has their fair share of them too. The plan down right scares the bejezus out of people that way. I am glad to see people here are not intimidated by such shallow rhetoric and lies.
I have a question. IF we switch to something like the Fair Tax which taxes consumption then doesn’t that seem a little unfair to people that paid taxes already under the current tax code? Wouldn’t the federal government be essentially just double taxing these folks on their retirement savings?
Seems UNfair to me. What about you?
JMG, that is a fair question. As someone myself that has studied the FairTax I can answer it. In order to understand this explanation you need to know that the FairTax is not a wide net consumption tax but a only narrow, national retail sales tax on new goods and services. Yes it taxes consumption but only at one point which is the end user.
Now for the double taxation question.
First of all, there are two types of retirement savings; pretax and post tax. If you have a 401(k), 403(b) or similar program provided by your employer then that money came out of your paycheck pretax and thus would not be “double taxed” under the FairTax so there is no issue here.
Now what about other savings you ask? What about money you invest AFTER taxes? Well, to understand that you have to understand the concept of embedded (or hidden) taxes. These are taxes that companies which make goods and provide services pay and as a result get rolled up into the final price of the goods and services they sell on down the line until they are ultimately paid by the end consumer of that good or service. These taxes are real and currently exist.
So are you not in fact already being “double taxed?” Yes, you are. Because companies do not pay taxes. Only the end user does.
The FairTax eliminates SSI, Medicare and corporate income taxes thus eliminating these hidden taxes which are no longer passed on under the plan. Yes, in the end you do pay the tax anyway under the FairTax, because it is added back on after all these rolled up and embedded taxes are removed but it is only on new goods and services. In the end it is a wash. But I hope that you see how the concern over double taxation argument is overblown. Rarely if ever do I hear people that complain about the double taxation problem of the FairTax express the same outrage over the hidden double taxation that we all deal with now under the current tax code. The great secret of the current income tax code is that when all is said and done after state, federal, local taxes, embedded taxes passed on by corporations and businesses and so on many Americans have between $0.40 – $0.50 of every dollar confiscated by government at some level if not more.
If you have any further questions or more questions about the double taxation situation let me know. Between myself and J.J. I know that we can answer them.
Thanks LibertarianPrince. That makes great sense and answers my concerns.
Indeed. Anyone with questions about the FairTax should indeed visit their site and actually read the plan rather than take Hank’s bizarre take on it for granted. I agree Jenny O.
This is odd. Mr. Jackson is talking about actually ending the federal socialist wealth redistribution rampant in this country and what gets the most attention is his third option which I read as his least favorite? That being the fair tax?
LOL! Maybe there is hope for America yet when a candid talk about what really needs done is not met with howls of anger!
Well, there have been a few comments from rabbid lefties that have been deleted because they were nothing explitives strung together to form what coul loosely be called a sentence.
Hank van Gieson is a self claimed expert on the Fair Tax yet his expertise on the issue is that he posts on blogs his comments about what he envisions as being supposedly wrong with the plan. But when you read his comments they are a jumble of semantic stretches mostly where he suggests words don’t mean what they mean.
For example he has claimed that embedded taxes are not real. But then claims that there are certainly embedded costs … which of course are a result of those taxes businesses pay. It is like arguing with a six year old when that argument is made. If the taxes are a cost then the cost is a tax carried through and embedded in the final price. He can spin as much as he wants.but the facts simply do not change.
That is just one example of how he tries to twist words to further his hypothesis and contentions.
This tactic however has not worked. Indeed I think he most certainly does sit around and google “fair tax” finding new places to keep spreading his own Big Lies.
You guys keep up the good work here and don’t let him get away with it.
Genn, I know exactly what you mean! Christ, it is like when our pols lower tax credits or allow existing cuts and exemptions to expire causing our taxes to go up. Then they claim that they never raised taxes even though the end result is a higher tax rate.
Those kinds of word games piss me off to no end and if you ask me are the final refuge of a shallow mind.
Yep. It is like someone seriously debating whether the sky is blue or azure and the person saying azure refusing to admit that the simple definition of blue is indeed accurate because they are set on making sure that they are right.
It is funny to watch but oh so very sad at the same time.
I appreciate people willing to put forth what may be unpopular ideas that are good solutions.
Thanks for posting this.