Feathering the Government's Nest

Pg 55-56 “Who’s Sitting on Your Nest Egg?”

It was the late French statesman J.B. Colbert who is credited as having said, “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.”

Congress and the Internal Revenue Service have long since perfected the “plucking the goose” part, without paying a whole lot of attention to how much hissing it triggers on the part of those being plucked.

In 2006, the plucking amounted to an average of $20,044 from every family in America, and that’s just by the federal government. By the time state and local governments get into the act, nearly one-third of your annual income will have disappeared.

One thing that continually puzzles me is why so many taxpayers actually do some of the plucking themselves, by having more of their hard-earned dollars withheld from their paychecks than is necessary. Every year, the IRS refunds billions of dollars to taxpayers, with the average refund amounting to more than $2,400. Those billions of dollars represent interest-free loans to the government, which makes absolutely no sense.

As the overwhelmingly majority of American taxpayers realize, our increasingly complex system of paying taxes is badly in need of major reform. Yet, until the day that happens, we’re very much at the mercy of fiscally irresponsible, big-spending politicians.

That’s where a well- qualified financial planner may come to your rescue, potentially saving a large quantity of your financial feathers and significantly reducing, if not eliminating, the plucking, and thus the need for you to hiss.

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