Welfare for the Rich

Description

Brace yourself for depression. Not the economic variety, but the emotional downswing that comes from analyzing what you already know about the gross waste of our federal government when it comes to doling out your hard-earned tax money. The key points of this book are certainly nothing new.

The problem with this book and others like it has nothing to do with what the authors advocate. In fact, what they advocate is something that every American taxpayer should consider. But a book such as this becomes dated far too quickly for lasting impact. Indeed, all the facts referenced by Phil Harvey and Lisa Conyers are well researched and valid for the time being. However, in less than five years an array of new facts will render them obsolete.

Up until the turn of the last century, long before there was such a thing as income tax or an Internal Revenue Service, America generated its revenue from tariffs. Robber barons such as J. P. Morgan, Dale Carnegie, J. D. Rockefeller, Andrew E. Mellon, and others lobbied Congress to shift the burden of financing the government to the general public through taxation. Thus, when the topic of reform is seriously discussed, one must consider how far back into the century of entangled lobbying we must go and what the net consequences and repercussions will ensue.

The taxpaying American public desperately needs an easy-to-understand lesson in the totality of the breakdown if real grassroots reform is to take hold, but someone must educate the public more thoroughly than this book delves. Harvey and Conyers may just be the authors to write such a book. This one makes a good starting place.