File: c:/ddc/Angel/BestIntentions/Democracy.html
Date: Mon Sep 10 21:02:30 2007
      Wed Jun 11 11:00:27 2008
      Sun Jan 17 17:57:21 2010
      Mon Aug 06 16:01:40 2018 / 2019
(C) OntoOO/ Dennis de Champeaux

Democracy

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
(Winston Churchill)

Democracy--rule by the people--sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.
(Edward Abbey)

We have guided missiles, but unguided man
(Graffiti in a Santa Cruz beach toilet)

Introduction

The previous chapters yielded uncommon, unpopular, and/or unfashionable observations about the 20th century: Our challenge here is to explain how these phenomena emerged and how our democracies caused them to become systemic. By backward reasoning, we arrived at some key events in the 19th century, which we believe to be the seeds for or facilitators of these phenomena.

After briefly describing the major features of democracy we dig into the three phenomena in turn. Of course, we need to keep in mind that they developed in parallel and were cross connected.

Democracy

It is impossible to avoid Sir Winston Churchill witticism "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried". This joke hides that democracy has many variants and has had many variants since its inception over two millenniums ago. Perhaps we are brainwashed about the superiority of democracy. If it is the best, why are there still many nations that have not embraced it?

Variants of democracy

It turns out that there is not a simple definition of democracy, beyond "government by the people". It resembles "games" in that it is a family-concept [Wittgenstein] for a plurality of instances.

Dimensions on which versions vary:
-- Direct, indirect, mixed: the people themselves are involved, or representatives are used, or both (through an occasional referendum)
-- People are those qualified, according to some criterion, or all people (with the exclusion of those under age)
-- Decision-making is through consensus, or through voting
-- Decision-making is for a specific topic (direct democracy), for a party, for a representative, for a leader, etc.

A direct democracy works fine in a small community. Switzerland, with 5 million voters, can handle it with national referendums and initiatives two to four times a year, while instruments are also well established at the cantonal and communal level.

California is using referendums occasionally. Problematic, however, is that an initiative overwhelmingly accepted by its voters, can be over ruled overnight by a federal judge who judges the result unconstitutional. Democracy gets complex when a constitution, federal, state and local laws need to be aligned according to ever-fluctuating interpretations.

The constituency of the people that is involved in the political process has typically increased from an elite, via all qualified males to the total adult population. This development in the 20th century has had a major, unforeseen impact, as we will discuss below.

Decision-making through consensus works only in small settings. Majority voting (or higher percentages when called for) takes care of obtaining decisions in larger settings. Agreements on basic rights, not open for discussion, prevents decision-making that would massacre minorities. The basic rights currently established may be ripe for a 'make over', as we will discuss below.

The topics for voting range widely. It can be a very specific proposal with a yes/no choice. It can be -- in an extreme case -- the affirmation of a leader without any alternative, except by abstaining. It can be for a leader with several alternatives, or for a leader of a party, which makes it ambiguous whether one votes for the person, for a party's ideology or for a party's program.

Voting itself has variants. Votes can be tallied directly or indirectly when districts are in between voters and what is being voted for. People accustomed to direct voting remain typically astonished about the 'dirty game' of gerrymandering - redrawing district boundaries to ascertain subsequent victories, while those accustomed to district tallying see gerrymandering as the 'rightful spoils of victory'.

Voting is normally one man - one vote. Alternatives are conceivable as demonstrated by the voting in corporations; the number of shares owned weights voting. Voting in the political realm could be weighted similarly, say based on the amount of taxes paid, but we are not aware of proposals for alternative weightings.

Some of democracy's pros and cons

Benevolent dictators have been quite sparse in recorded history. A democracy has the advantage that a bad leader will be thrown out after awhile thereby limiting damages. The price for the automatic removal is, however, not negligible.

Voting keeps the population engaged in what goes on in the world. The population thereby shares the responsibility for developments.

Most political decisions involve tradeoffs in which not everyone can be a winner. Voting is the brilliant solution to deal with this unfortunate reality. Acceptance of a vote is, however, an acquired ability. Early democracies struggle with human creativity aimed at nefariously influencing voting, while even the people in the US cannot stop bickering about the abortion decision by the Supreme Court decades ago.

We are happy to quote positive claims about democracy from [Democracy]:

Empirical research shows that more democratic nations have little democide; rarely or never make war on one another, and have few civil wars.

Poor democracies have better education, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, access to drinking water, and better health care than poor dictatorships. This is not due to higher levels of foreign assistance or spending a larger percentage of GDP on health and education. Instead, the available resources are managed better. Democracies do not have large-scale famines.

Refugee crises almost always occur in non-democracies. Looking at the volume of refugee flows for the last twenty years, the first eighty-seven cases occurred in autocracies. Political institutions are extremely important in determining the prevalence of corruption: democracy, parliamentary systems, political stability, and freedom of the press are all associated with lower corruption. Democracies are more likely to win wars than non-democracies. Democracies are more often associated with a higher average self-reported happiness in a nation.

After all the good news lets have a look at candidate problems.

An indirect democracy requires voting periodically or when a government fails. This entails that the constituents from whom the electorate has to choose must 'sell' themselves. Arguments that appeal to the (long term) common good are a difficult sell. Instead we see proposals to reduce taxes, the introduction of a new entitlement (without mentioning how to fund it), promises to improve public education without being specific about details, proposals to be tough on crime without acknowledging that the population itself is the problem, plans to improve healthcare while not mentioning that its cost structure is already way out of control, etc.

Voting occurs typically every 4-5 years. This duration impacts the time horizon of projects to be considered on the political agendas. A water distribution project including an aqueduct crossing a river in the South of France took a generation to complete - in the time of the Romans. Democracies cannot deal with such projects and, for example, postpone addressing looming bankruptcies - within a few decades - of the Social Security and Medicare entitlements. The rising of oceans due to global warming can, for example, be discussed in abstract but remedial actions are immediately derailed due to short-term concerns about the economy.

The three large problems

The population explosion

The facilitator for the 400% population increase in the 20th century is the breakthroughs of Science in the 19th century. These helped to amplify and spread to other countries the Industrial Revolution that had started in Britain in the 18th century. Pasteur's phenomenal results helped to reduce mortality by, among others, decreasing infections. Energy production through oil took off around 1900, which bootstrapped all subsequent developments, which helped a growing population to survive.

The simplest explanation for the population explosion is that people continued their traditional procreation habits although children mortality dropped. We can classify countries into three groups regarding their growth trends (ignoring migration flows):
-- Countries where the growth has leveled off below replacement level
-- Countries where the growth rate may have decreased but is still exponential
-- China where the government has intervened to force the growth to stop (which excludes certain sub-populations so that China's population is still growing)
Countries where procreation has decreased below the replacement level are still growing due to migration from countries where the population is still exploding.

For all countries in the phase of exponential growth there is the question how the population is/ was able to pay for the many more surviving children, because the breakthroughs of technology are not a sufficient explanation for what happened. There are different answers for the different countries.

There are countries where the population cannot keep up with population growth and lacking resources they descend into poverty, famines and occasional civil wars. Generosity of rich nations kicks in when yet another natural disaster strikes, but since population control cannot be imposed as a condition for assistance the decline resumes. Niger is an example.

There are countries that have natural resources that can be sold by a monopolistic government on the world market. The revenues are used to create extensive, 'free' social services and government agencies establish a trickle down economy, which keeps the population employed. Poverty rates depends, among others, on the trickle down effectiveness. Example countries: Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela.

The democratic countries that are now considered to be rich had a different approach when they went through the exponential growth phase. Public education, was the innovation where monies raised by taxes benefited citizens different from those who provided the monies. The acceptance of this nation-wide, systemic altruism - later often labeled solidarity - paved the way for financial transfers to pay for children that the parents could not afford. Tax deduction for having children, actual payouts for having children (the Netherlands), highly subsidized higher education, subsidized healthcare, subsidized housing, subsidized retirement programs, etc. all became necessary to financially support increasing segments of growing populations. Actually, all these assistance programs are still necessary because most of their populations are not self-reliant. In-flowing migrants rely on these assistance programs as well.(2)

The emergence of massive solidarity in the 20th century benefits from an explanation to better assess its consequences. Public education may not have been initiated due to systemic altruism, but for the fear of endemic crime and social chaos as a result of suddenly increasing poverty at the end of the 19th century under laissez-faire business freedom. And there are deeper reasons.

The French revolution created the innovation of equal rights for all citizens. The extend of these rights was at least equal, basic opportunities for pursuing one's goals to obtain whatever. Darwin's evolution theory threw cold water on these basic rights by the notion of "survival of the fittest". Individuals may have all the same rights but they have different abilities to pursue what they are after. That can be perceived as unfair if equal rights is interpreted - even half way - as rights to affluence. The solidarity in our democracies can thus be explained as a means to compensate for the different, 'unfair', capabilities of individuals.

Durant's "Lessons of History", [Durant], reminds that the French revolution was not the first event where equality was declared. They note: "... there have been socialistic experiments in a dozen countries and centuries." They proceed describing numerous examples - starting with Sumeria 2100 B.C. - that are better labeled as communistic than socialistic given substantial state control of their economies. Their explanation: "Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically ...". Our welfare states are, according to their historical perspective, just yet another experiment of socialism.

The commonality of all nations is that the population explosion produced citizenries that are either impoverished and need international assistance or need extensive assistance from government programs.

Unsustainable economies

While 'everyone' knows for decades that the world's economies are unsustainable - given the current rates of extraction of the Planet's resources - we are paralyzed to take action. Who is "we"? Lets revisit the classification of nations above again.

The notion of 'unsustainable economy' has no significance for those nations where the population is impoverished. They would be delighted when their status allows them to be invited in the discussion. Still they are part of the problem. Attempts to alleviate their misery is never spearheaded by reducing their out of control population. Addressing their basic inability to live of the (mental) land they possess is off limits. Similarly to individuals who have these days a disproportional sense of entitlement, these countries do not have a self-improving potential.

The countries whose economies depend on the extraction of oil or the like are the most problematic in the sense that there is no way for them to even consider the concept of sustainability: non-sustainability is how they exist for now. When their resource run out, they either collapse, Nauru, or they switch to services, Dubai, hoping that the World will have the discretionary resources to consume their services.

China is a special case with its 1.4B(?) population. It is a relatively poor country, ravaged by wars and 'crazy' social experiments in the 20th century. Still it has stamina rooted in a history of millenniums. It has embarked on catch-up modernization with me-too economic developments. Thereby it replicates rapidly the fallacies of the West, with disastrous implications for the World due to the size of its population.

The democracies in the West have led the way to non-sustainability. They are the owners of the science and technology, which supports a lifestyle for the masses that is the envy of the rest of the World.

Again: who is "we" that knows about the non-sustainability of the World's economies beyond business that use "sustainability" disingenuously in their marketing campaigns? A few eggheads that no one wants to listen to? The constitutions of democracies have no 'awareness' of sustainability of an economy. A politician cannot tell the electorate that several Earths are required to support worldwide the consumption rate of his/her constituents. The consumption rate entails an economic flux whose taxation is required to keep the population afloat. Breaking out of this deadlock is beyond our democracies already for as long as we know.

Decline of the 'quality' of citizens

This topic is the most difficult to address by any type of government. Our theory about the emergence of systemic altruism explains the rational of all entitlement programs that were enacted. The 'detail' of unintended side effects - slowly growing dependency on these programs due to the feedback loop described in the Public Education chapter - has been ignored by our democracies. Medi-Cal, [MediCal]:
Is the source of health coverage for:
     Almost one in three of Californians under age 65;
     One in three of the state's children; and
     The majority of people living with AIDS.
Pays for:
     Forty-six percent of all births in the state;
     Two-thirds of all nursing home residents;
     Almost two-thirds of all net patient revenue in California's public hospitals.
The US Food Stamps program is obviously beneficial. But consider [NYT]:
The Safety Net Food Stamp Use Soars, and Stigma Fades A program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children.
How is it possible that 25% of the US children need food assistance in what is often described as the wealthiest nation of the world?

Even stranger is that in California 9.2% childeren have subsidized lunches and 46.7% have free lunches so that the parents of 55.9% of the children cannot feed their children [CDE].

When we would push harder and ask "Why were these children being put in the world when their parents cannot even feed them properly?" moral outrage is the typical response, as if the parents are blamed - instead of the system that justifies their choices.

Note that the statistics quoted above are consistent with the statistics of the 'economic ability' distribution that we gave in the Income Distribution Deterioration chapter. The most salient data:
- The bottom 50% earns only 12% of the nation's income
- The bottom 50% owns a shrinking 5.8% of the nation's assets.

Even more questionable is the question what humanity as a species has gained from the increase from 1.6B in 1900 to over 7+B of the world population, while its quality has decreased. Murray claims in [Murray] that Mathematics reached its peak in the 18th century, hard Sciences around 1800, technology in the mid 19th century. Per capita calculations will bend his curves down further in the 20th century.(3)

After moral outrage has subsided, we still need to ponder why humanity (except partially China) after a century has not found a way to constrain freedom of procreation to:
- block exponential growths
- prevent procreation beyond one's 'fair share', and
- obtain reasonable assurance that the society does not become (financially) responsible for children

Of course, we are not the first questioning the unconditional generosity that is not compatible with survival of the fittest, the process operating during the preceding billion years, which has produced humanity (and all other living species) as we know it. Dawkins warned already in the early 70-ties [Dawkins]:

But the welfare state is a very unnatural thing. In nature, parents who have more children than they can support do not have many grand children, and their genes are not passed on to future generations. ... Contraception is sometimes attacked as 'unnatural'. So it is very unnatural. The trouble is, so is the welfare state. ... But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth-control, otherwise the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature.
This warning has not been heeded and the world population passed the sustainability level at 4B people in 1980 [Meadows].

'Small potato' failures

Democracy as we know it fails to tackle the three large trends dealt with above. Here topics of smaller scope that could be used to think through how to upgrade our democracies from the bottom up.

Self sufficiency erosion

The lack of economic self sufficiency took a century to develop and is proceeding further. Taxation reduction for having children - in this context - decreases self-sufficiency as well; why not pay for the services that the government provides? Not everyone would originally have been able to do that, requiring assistance, but now the majority needs assistance.

Dutch rent control

The Second World War had destroyed The Netherlands. Rebuilding in 1945 required to keep the wages low and solidarity was invoked to introduce temporarily rent control. A complex bureaucracy emerged to allocate scarce apartments to a burgeoning population. A black market flourished where 'key' money allowed jumping the lines. The 70-ties liberated the market partially. Apartments under 500 guilders remained under rent control; above that amount the market was free. No apartments were available between 500 and 1000 guilders. The Netherlands has a government organization with the name "Central Planning Bureau", which comes straight from a Soviet inspired era. This organization reported in 2008 that the rental market is 'seriously distorted' because people with high income reside in cheap apartments. They proposed to abolish rent control.

While this may be seen as a funny anecdote, it illustrates painfully that politicians are, in a democracy, unable to retract an originally sympathetic and rational arrangement, which became an entitlement, caused a black market, created corruption, and became absurd (while owners of rental properties have never been compensated for their 'solidarity' and to add insult to injury it takes still at least three years of litigation to evict renters under very limited circumstances).

Election 2000

The US Presidential election in 2000 produced a 50-50% stalemate that after an abundance of confusion about the voting in Florida had to be resolved by the Supreme Court. The mess in Florida overshadowed the preceding dysfunction. Both parties and both candidates had not been able to articulate a convincing description of the state of affairs, what they considered problems to be addressed and how they planned solving these problems. Lets try to return to the year 2000.

The dot-com economic boom had not yet collapsed. The preceding attacks on the World Trade Center had been ignored as crank events. The nation was wallowing in economic prosperity due to a peace dividend, the end of the Cold War. However, the country had (and has) structural problems:
- Growing dependence on foreign oil, while nuclear technology was blocked due the never ending stalemate in Nevada about the storage of nuclear waste; high labor productivity, but at the expense of low energy efficiency; inefficient infrastructure in the sense that its low density does not allow for public transportation;
- Growing dependence on foreign knowledge workers in the high tech sector due to the inability of the education sector to produce sufficiently many native engineers (half of the Silicon Valley workforce is foreign born);
- Growing problems with social security because its pay-as-you-go feature has not been transformed into a pension system and its insolvency is getting closer and closer every year;
- Growing problems with the Medicare expenditures, due to lack of guidelines, and cost controls, out of control administrative overhead and the looming insolvency due to the baby-boomer bulge;
- Growing number of illegal immigrants. A 1986 law legalized 2.8M illegal aliens. They kept entering the country at a rate of 500,000/year. While it is claimed that they pay their fair share of taxes, on average they have only a seventh grade education and thus they have joined those that take more out of the system than what they contribute;
- Urban sprawl, ecological destruction, and the other usual problems discussed by 'eggheads' were (and are) also part of the structural problems.

To be fair, one candidate brought up the 'unfortunate' topic of the environment. He lost the election. The other topics were too difficult/ sensitive/ unpopular to be part of the discussion and thus the electorate ended up with a 50-50 stalemate.

Referendum 2004

A 2004 referendum in California proposed a special 1% tax on incomes over $1,000,000 to fund mental health service programs. It passed with 53.8% votes in favor and 46.2% against. It affected approximately 25,000 to 30,000 taxpayers (less than 0.1% of the population of California, which is over 30 million). Why was this tax approved given that 3% of the tax payers provide already 50% of California income taxes? (2018: top 1% pays 48% of the income tax.) A detailed analysis can be found in [proposition63]. This article lists some intriguing objections:
(1) Why tax millionaires? Shouldn't everyone pay for mental health? Why not tax people who earn $900,000 or $500,000?
(2) Proposition 63 will create a counter cyclical tax. Mental health services funding will fall in economic recessions, when the mentally ill are the most likely to be unable to pay for mental health services.
(3) Is a 1 percent tax the right amount? Maybe the system could really use an increase of $2 billion per year.
(4) Taxes like this set a bad precedent. They create a bad business climate and may drive millionaires from the state.
(5) Creating special taxes to meet the needs of one disadvantaged population sets a bad precedent for bypassing the legislature in establishing statewide priorities and adequate funding. What group will be next to launch its own initiative and create its own tax? This is the first step on the slippery slope toward a 1 percent tax for every pet project.
(6) There is some feeling that direct democracy could be dangerous. Propositions get onto the ballot in part because funds are used to gather and pay for the needed signatures.
(7) There is little assurance that funds will be spent wisely.
California is the land of fruits & nuts, as the saying goes. The demand for mental health services continuous to outstrip the new funding; see [breakdown].

Referendum 2006

A California referendum in 2006 proposed a special tax on incomes over $400K for individuals and $800K for couples to finance Public Preschool Education. This proposition failed with only 39.1% in favor and 60.9% against. This referendum satisfies the concern formulated above: "... the slippery slope toward a 1 percent tax for every pet project." However, this tax was rejected. Because the prospective beneficiaries were not enough part of the general population?

Taxability

Taxation is a tricky topic because arguing for increasing taxation on the rich or decreasing it yields predictable responses. Instead we want to report that we were disturbed when we stumbled on the distorted distribution of the sources of the income taxes. The issue is not whether 'soaking the rich' is justified or not. A technical concern is that a small drop in the economy is sufficient to reduce substantially tax revenues. Dan Walters, a Sacramento Bee columnist, writes [Walters]:
When California's personal income tax revenues took a sudden jump last year ... it turned out to be mostly due to a payment by one very high-income taxpayer. ...
it underscores a tax system that makes it increasingly difficult for the state to balance its books because of its utter dependence on a relatively handful of high-income taxpayers. ...
Finally, their incomes are in large measure dependent on how well the stock market is doing.
A few billionaires deciding to relocate out of state would have a substantial impact. This cannot be right.

However, we are bewildered - instead of disturbed - when we realized that the statistical data shows that a great majority of the population is not economically self-sufficient. Thus, while there is no need to quibble whether Walters refused to draw a politically sensitive conclusion, the more pressing problem is that we need a population where a great majority contributes economically instead of being subsidized.

Lets push harder on this topic. The principle of balances of power is well appreciated. We have also constitutions that describe basic rights that, for example, prevent a majority to pass a law to exterminate a minority. Governments have the right to collect taxes. They can create and abolish taxes. There is, however, no principle that limits taxability. This fundamental omission allows politicians to 'throw money at problems' instead of dealing with root causes. The emergence of huge transfer functions in welfare state governments to deal with slow increasing economic dependency of now majorities is the prime example of this omission.

This is yet another example that a fundamental upgrade of our democracies is required. The balances of power devised over two hundred years ago are 'leaking' and need to be rethought.

Dumping democracy?

The Durant's (Will in his 80-ies) were not shy after rereading their own extensive oeuvre. Describing the aftermath of the French revolution they wrote in [Durant]: "... and democracy took its turn in the misgovernment of mankind." Echoing Churchill they wrote: "Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple."

Democracy as we know it - see the section above - has failed to deal with the three big problems as well as with the smaller ones. There is nothing in our constitutions about civil obligations, the need for self sufficiency, economic sustainability, responsibility for indefinite future generations, preserving bio-diversity, etc., etc.

These omissions allow our politicians, and the political parties, to pander during elections with new entitlements, lower taxes and more environmental plunder that exploit our infantile, self-centered, short term, reckless stances.

Combine this with an economy guided by a GDP metric, which gives a rosy delusion of what we are up to and what our collective assets are.

Dumping democracy is not an option. The alternatives have terrible track records. Upgrades are, however necessary. The Finale chapter is devoted to that challenge.

Notes

(1) We have used "economic net-consumer" to mean a person who receives more in social services than what is paid in taxes. The 2007-? depression has increased the assistance that the society provides according to an article in Barron 2010 January 18:
-- What is truly shocking is that 20% of personal income in the US now is transfer payments - money handed out by the government. And that number is rising.
-- How does that compare to Europe?
-- It is about the same and also rising.
(1a) Charles Murray used the term "custodial democracy" already in [Murray0].

(2) The experiment with communism in the USSR must have paved the way subsequently for solidarity as well.

(3) The declines discussed in [Murray] began indeed long before the population started the exponential growth around 1900. Still the population growth (and thus the 'volume' increase of raw IQ) has not helped the human cultural achievement rates, but brought it further down.

References

[breakdown] "Breakdown: A Times Special Report/ Mental Health in California", 2007, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-breakdown-sg,0,64526.storygallery

[CDE] A spreadsheet for 2010 school lunches in California. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sh/cw/documents/frpm2009.xls

[Dawkins] Dawkins, R., The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 1976 & 1989 & 2005.

[Democracy] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy

[Durant] Durant, W. & A. Durant, "The Lessons of History", Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1968.

[Meadows] Meadows, D., J. Randers, & D. Meadows, Limits to Growth, The 30-Year Update, Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 2004.

[MediCal] http://www.chcf.org/documents/policy/MediCalFactsAndFigures2007.pdf

[Murray0] Murray, C., "The Coming of Custodial Democracy", Commentary 86, no 3, vol 24, 1986 September.

[Murray] Murray, C., Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-019247-X, 2003.

[NYT] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/us/29foodstamps.html?hp

[proposition63] Scheffler, R. M. & N. Adams, "Millionaires And Mental Health: Proposition 63 In California", Health Affairs, 2005 May, http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/hlthaff.w5.212/DC1

[Walters] Walters, D,, "California too reliant on rich taxpayers", in San Jose Mercury News, page 15A, 2007 Jan 5.

[Wittgenstein] Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell Publishers, ISBN 0-631-23127-7, 2001.

Appendix

Here a list of taxes 'dreamed' up in the 20th century to finance entitlements.

Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
CDL license Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Dog License Tax
Excise Taxes
Federal Income Tax
Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing
License Tax
Food License Tax
Fuel Permit Tax
Gasoline Tax (currently 44.75 cents per gallon)
Gross Receipts Tax
Hunting License Tax
Inheritance Tax
Inventory
IRS Interest Charges
IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
Liquor Tax
Luxury Taxes
Marriage License
Medicare Tax
Personal Property Tax
Property Tax
Real Estate Tax
Service Charge Tax
Social Security Tax
Road Usage Tax
Recreational Vehicle Tax
Sales Tax
School Tax
State Income Tax
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
Telephone Federal Excise Tax
Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
Telephone Recurring and Nonrecurring Charges Tax
Telephone State and Local Tax
Telephone Usage Charge Tax
Utility Taxes
Vehicle License Registration Tax
Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft Registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax

We have been notified of additional ones: Cat licence tax, Electronic waste recycling fee, Gambling tax, Lodging taxes, Tire disposal tax, Vaccinations excise tax, and there must be many more.

Airline tickets are another source of desperate revenue generation:
US to Caribbean island: $606 + 117 tax
US to European country: $600 + 413 tax

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