Today, I thought I’d clue you in to a little bit of personal information about myself. I work in payroll. I process people’s paychecks. And I have first hand experience witnessing the devastation that Uncle Sam throws upon hard working American citizens.

It wasn’t always like this. When this nation was formed, taxes were low. The entrepreneurial spirit could take a person wherever they wanted to go in life. Things changed some during the Industrial Revolution and it became harder to leave the lower class for the middle class and even more difficult to leave the middle class for the upper class. And then, the Great Depression. FDR used the Depression as an excuse to socialize the American economy, and things have never been worse for the working class. Taxes are higher, work incentives are lower and it’s virtually impossible for the average person to start a business, let alone become successful as a business owner.

And it isn’t just individual taxpayers who suffer as a result of this socialized governmental system. Even huge corporations suffer–you may not believe it, but I have proof that they do. Take the example of the average Federal tax levy. The IRS sends the levy to me–the payroll girl–and I’m expected to first sift through 12 to 15 pages of legalese to determine what needs to be done with the levy. It’s then my responsibility, after spending at least an hour of company time trying in vain to comprehend the document, to track down the employee (still on company time) and demand that they give me the social security numbers of any dependent children. I then take another hour or so from my company to set up a garnishment on the employee’s wages. All told, enforcing a Federal levy (or state levy, garnishment, child support order, etc) could take up to 4 hours of my time. That is wasted time. That’s wasted wages that my company is paying me and that the IRS (or state, etc) is not reimbursing us for. That’s forcing employers to do the government’s job and giving the employer nothing in return for it. In fact, when we return documentation to the IRS, the envelopes don’t even come postage paid. You heard me, it’s the employer’s responsibility to pay postage to return the IRS’s documents to them after doing the IRS’s job for them!

There’s also the story of that poor, unfortunate employee. There are legitimate reasons that a person may fall behind on their taxes–illness, financial hardship, moral opposition to having one’s property stolen to fund wars, a deadbeat baby daddy refusing to pay child support, or in the case of my employees, they’re good southern folk who don’t think they need to pay Uncle Sam since they tried to secede from this country anyways. And then the IRS tracks the employee, often times a person who has worked for my company for years and often times displaying an exemplary work ethic, and enforces a Federal levy on them. The IRS doesn’t care if you have rent to pay, children to feed or medicine to pay for. The IRS only cares about one thing, and that’s stealing your time and the fruits of that labor. If you, Mr. Taxpayer, should become the victim of a federal levy, you’ll bring home $200 every two week pay period, no matter how much your gross pay is. If you don’t have medical benefits, you may be lucky enough to bring home a whopping $350 MAXIMUM. The IRS isn’t going to give you enough money to buy shelter, food or gas to go to work. You will be working and homeless once the IRS has its way with you. You, Mr. Taxpayer, are very literally better off on welfare because it’s a waste of your time to work if you can’t keep enough of your pay to even feed yourself.

I’ve had three employees simply quit coming to work within the last month after the IRS caught up with them. It’s unfortunate because these aren’t the leeches on society that the IRS would have you believe. These people work full time–in fact, these three people were working full time plus days worth of overtime each pay period. These are people with a work ethic. These are the kind of people that we need to be encouraging to be productive. Instead, society is encouraging them to get on welfare. That puts a burden on my employer who now needs to fill three new positions and train three new employees who, unfortunately, may not be good employees like the three we’ve lost. It puts a strain on the families of those three workers who are now unemployed. It puts a strain on every member of this society who must now subsidize those families who can no longer financially support themselves.

I’d say that the IRS should be ashamed of itself, but I know that the IRS has no shame. The IRS isn’t like a human being capable of showing compassion for others and the IRS has no interest in seeing individuals or American society succeed. The IRS has one goal and that goal is at odds with the individual goals of every single person in the United States. Don’t let them fool you into thinking that these predatory tax collection methods are good for us. They’re not. They’re just causing good people lose their incentive to contribute to society.