The Ugly Truth About Taxes: You want the truth about taxes? You probably can’t handle the truth.

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You want the truth about taxes? You probably can’t handle the truth about taxes. Many, many, many moons ago, I wrote a column entitled, The Truth About Taxes. And basically what I did was I broke down income taxes, federal income taxes, and how they are paid based upon a restaurant bill. And the premise was 10 guys go out to dinner and their bill every night is 100 bucks.

and it’s divvied up based upon how our tax code works. And it was ages and ages and ages ago. Yeah, that’s the truth about income taxes in regards to how they’re divvied up. But I want to get into the truth about all of the taxes we actually pay. I’ve talked about this this past week when it came to tariffs. And again, I’ve tried to get this across to people out there. Some are just unwilling to listen.

Tariffs attacks. Tariffs attacks. When push comes to shove, it’s going to be paid by the consumer. Maybe not right away. Maybe not right away. Actually, know, to some degree, sometimes when the economy slows, tariffs can actually be deflationary in some respects because people stop spending money and prices come down. But overall, when all is said and done,

the tariff gets paid. Just like your property taxes have to get paid. Just like the sales tax has to get paid. A tariff is essentially, that’s all it is. It’s another sales tax. Now, that’s not the only taxes we pay, pay income tax, Income tax, we pay the tariff tax. What about your payroll tax? Some people don’t consider that a tax because they think that the money

is going into some sort of account for them somewhere guarded by the dragons from Harry Potter at Gringotts Bank. That’s my social security account. That’s where my money went. No, no, Your money, your payroll tax dollars went to the same place that your income tax dollars went to, same place that the tariff taxes went to. All same place.

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all the same place, but I’m going to get Social Security back. Listen, listen. Think of your Social Security check that you get as a refund, a tax refund, if you get it, because again, we all know what’s going on with Social Security at this point in time. But let’s be honest. Many of us, many of us paid in.

a hell of a lot more than we’re ever going to get out of it, meaning what? It’s a tax. Let’s talk about another major tax that we all pay. That is the inflation tax.

This is where they take your dollars and they whittle them down because they’re printing more dollars. Again, since the year 2000, buying power has decreased here in this country by almost 50%. Hey, and you don’t forget about all those other little taxes that you pay on gasoline and beer and stuff that’s embedded and you don’t even know.

We are in a, we’re in a perpetual state of paying taxes here in this country. That’s the truth. That’s the reality. And you can point all the fingers you want, but you know we got to turn point that finger, got to point that finger at yourself. We the people continue to demand more and more and more from the government. We the people completely unable to reform social security, the third row.

of American politics can’t touch that. Hands off my social security. Well, we might want to change. You might want to fix it because it’s going under. This is the reality of our world. And again, I accept it. I do. What choice do you have, quite frankly? I one of the things that we advise people on proper tax strategies, trying to lower your taxes as best you possibly can. You can’t lower tariff taxes, can you?

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Got to pay them at the point of sale. You know, I, for years, I actually pushed for actually going towards the fair tax, national sales tax, eliminating everything else. I have to be great, but first you have to make the income tax unconstitutional. But again, who’s to say they’re just not going to go ahead and raise the tariff taxes or find some other way to bang you over the head. Our government needs

revenues. And I make this perfectly clear. It’s not politically expedient to go out and raise taxes. It’s not. I’m trying to think the last time last time somebody really raised your taxes was actually George. I’m trying to think George H. Bush. Yeah, Bush won. Remember, read my lips. No new taxes. He’s the last one that did. can say, well, no, they went up over Obama. No Obama.

Obama just didn’t extend the George W tax cuts. He didn’t extend them. So again, they expired. Trump tax cuts have been made permanent. But once you realize that all of government spending is essentially a tax on we the people, somebody has to pay it. We can only borrow so much money.

This is the hole that we’re in at this point in time. And it’s quite frankly, it’s sad. It really is. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.