By MARK STEYN 

Posted 04/09/2010 04:55 PM ET

We are nearing the climax of “tax season.” That’s the problem right there, by the way:

Summer should have a season, and baseball should have a season, but not tax. Happily, like candy canes and Christmas tree lights on Dec. 26, the TurboTax boxes will soon be disappearing from the display racks until the nights start drawing in and the leaves fall from the trees and tax season begins anew in seven or eight months’ time.

And yet for an increasing number of Americans tax season is like baseball season: It’s a spectator sport. According to the Tax Policy Center, 47% of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax for the year 2009. Obviously, many of them pay other kinds of taxes — state tax, property tax, cigarette tax.

But at a time of massive increases in federal spending half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, don’t ask me why).

Half a decade back, it was just under 40% who paid no federal income tax; now it’s just under 50%.

By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever-shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury.

In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from “No taxation without representation” to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it. The top 5% of taxpayers contribute 60% of revenue. The top 10% provide 75%. Another two-fifths make up the rest. And half are exempt.

This isn’t redistribution — a “leveling” to address the “mal-distribution” of income, as Sen. Max Baucus, (D-Kleptocristan) put it the other day. It isn’t even “spreading the wealth around,” as then Sen. Barack Obama put it in an unfortunate off-the-prompter moment during the 2008 campaign.

Rather, it’s an assault on the moral legitimacy of the system. If you accept the principle of a tax on income, it might seem reasonable to exclude the very poor from having to contribute to it. But in no meaningful sense can half the country be considered “poor.” The U.S. income tax is becoming the 21st century equivalent of the “jizya” — the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens: In return for funding the Islamic imperium, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith.

Read more at: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=529854

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