 Welcome to the Knuckleheads of Liberty. The impudence, the audacity, the unmitigated gall of those Knuckleheads of Liberty podcasters, daring to voice opinions outside the mainstream of accepted thought. Listen, if you dare, it's angry, it's funny, it's even sometimes sad, but it's always based on freedom and justice as you will see. Here's our host, Jason McPhee. Welcome to the Knuckleheads of Liberty. We are coming at you on April 20th, 2022, and I'm sure you're all in a lot of pain after coming past tax day just a few days ago. So we're going to jump into that in this show, but before we do, let me introduce you to our panel. In our upper left-hand corner, we have Leon, the word Brathwaite last word in Liberty because he's a retired engineer in the state of California. In our upper right-hand corner, we have our screaming eagle of freedom, Tim Ever. He is a pilot in the state of California. My name's Jason McPhee, and I'll be your host. I don't know what this is about, finger wagging. Well, I'm sure that we'll have a lot to finger wag about in this after talking about all the craziness of our government tax system. But just to wrap you for the show on taxes and crazy government spending, let's bring up a visual because it's just kind of this magical moment that we saw here over the weekend, just the day before taxes happened to be Easter this year. And so let me play you the video. And here, you actually see Biden, and he literally had to be shepherded by the Easter Bunny. He doesn't appear to know exactly where he is. He almost seemed a little bit angry and disoriented when the Easter Bunny came to let him know that he had to move on. But anyway, it's funny. It's such a magical world for Biden when he happens to be living in such a scary world for the rest of us. But I just thought that that was so indicative of where we're at with the way the government spends our money. So let's talk a little bit about taxes. So, one, our tax code is insanely complex. And I guess one of the things I wanted to talk about here is how much we spend on taxes every year. So here's a story from my visual. You mean tax preparation, don't you? Tax preparation, yeah. But we'll also talk about just how much we as individuals spend as well, too, in terms of our time in a second, too. But just tax preparation. So this graphic is essentially showing that the cost of taxes is right around $11 billion is roughly what we're spending as a nation. Just in having people advise us on how to pay our taxes. I mean, that's not including the IRS, right? I mean, all that money they want to spend on the IRS. This is just getting help to figure out how much we're supposed to pay in this complicated system. And Reason had an article as well recently where they talked about 6.5 billion hours. So we have about 325 million people in this country. And they're estimating that about 6.5 billion hours is spent on income taxes each year. Now, if you just imagine, conservatively, 20 bucks an hour, if everybody was, again, of course, that's not even the average. That's lowballing it. But let's say everybody was just getting paid 20 bucks an hour. That's over $120 billion that we're really spending in our productive time on just figuring out how to pay the government. And there are better ways out there. And I just wanted to share with you apparently the, what's it here? Estonia is one of those countries that apparently has a very competitive tax system. They're using a simplified flat tax and a bat tax. And their president, I guess, as they came out of communism, was an Acolyte and a person who was an admirer of Milton Friedman's. And so he was all about simplicity and reducing government. And so he wound up giving them this much better outlook toward government such that they're on a fairly healthy trajectory with some of this stuff. Such to the point where we were talking about spending 6.5 billion hours here trying to figure it out. They're spending 3 to 5 minutes to figure out their tax code. So what do you guys have to think about that? What is this crazy complexity that we have in our tax code? And what's it getting us? But anyway, what do you guys think? This is the oppressive nature of government at work here. Imagine what's going on here. We are supposed to be paying taxes. Sure, the government needs to be funded and they need to have some essential functions. Well, they have gone way beyond essential functions now. But there are some essential functions that government must do. We must fund them. Nobody argues that point for the most part. But look at what the government is doing. They're arming the IRS who's supposed to collect our taxes. They're arming the IRS to come after us, which is what they've been doing for years. Any little mistake we make, we can end up with an audit. And if they find any little thing, they could penalize us. They could tax us. They could do all sorts of things and even imprison us if we don't pay those taxes. So the tax code in all its complexity is now being used as an oppressive tool. That's what's going on. The tax code itself is being used as a tool of oppression. Why? So that the power of the federal government can grow and keep on growing. Look at the amount of time. Think about the loss of productivity that is going on each year in the United States. Think about the loss of productivity that is going on just because of the complexity of the tax codes. And you could see nothing else other than the fact that the government is using the tax codes and the IRS to destroy our liberties and our freedoms. Yeah, that's why we can't have nice things. Yes. Not only is it the tax money that pulls out of our pocketbook and goes into those paragons of morality and restraint in the government to spend as they wish on stuff that everybody knows. Everybody wants like a new, I like F-18s, but I mean, they cost a lot of money and tanks and whatever other things, not to mention the other things they spend money on, overspend money on. And generally, these are things that we simply don't want ourselves. Don't want them, don't need them. They're not really part of the free market economy. So all this money is being siphoned from the free market economy and being put into whatever cronyist markets that government has gone into cahoots with. So that, coupled with all this time spent on these complex tax returns, and it reminds me of the amount of time that has spent ever since 9-11. No, I shouldn't say 9-11. Okay, that came about on its own for other reasons. But now the reaction that the United States government did with the Patriot Act and the so-called Freedom Act, I love how they name the acts exact opposite of what they are. And so these acts have created this monstrous security theater that employs people and has people, I mean, out on the ramp at San Diego Lindbergh, there are two guys just on the cargo ramp that sit out there in chairs. I think they sit out there 24 hours a day. I see them there morning, noon and night. And they just sit around and watch. They're looking for the terrorists. Now, calculate, these people aren't in the free market making goods and services. Just like when you fill out your tax return, you're not doing anything. You're not either buying something, using some service, or providing some service or good. You're not making anything. You're just doing, essentially, nonsense. You're just digging a hole and putting the dirt back in. That's all you're doing for the government, for the right to pay the government whatever they want. So anyway, yes, oppression has returned. The old slave masters are just like, the new slave masters are just like the old. And here we are. We can't have nice things. This is another aspect of these complicated tax codes we have. It allows the government to pick winners and losers using the tax codes. And that is for socialist ends. Because what they do is they use the tax codes for social engineering. And that's what's going on. That's been going on for a long, long time. And if we don't do something about these complex tax codes that we're dealing with right now, we can't be living in a socialist empire one of these days. And then we wake up and wonder how it happened. It's happening because of these complex tax codes that they are enforcing upon us. Well, you know, if something is complex, the only people who have the time to look at it are the concentrated interests, right? I mean, the rest of us don't have the time to lobby for a few dollars here or there. And that's the problem, that we're dispersed interests. You know, a couple dollars doesn't mean much. But the guy collecting at the other end, you know, the guy who's trying to skew the table towards him, if he's able to siphon a few dollars from every person, boy, that's a big amount in the end. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness always and forever.