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Taxation Is An Issue That Has Plagued The United States Essay

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Taxation is an issue that has plagued the United States even prior to the founding of the

nation and the issue at hand is fair taxation. American Colonists were being taxed unfairly

without parliamentary representation, and now ordinary modern Americans are being taxed

unfairly without legal representation. There is a sector of the citizenry that hold the belief that the

progressive tax code, employed by the United States, and is fair as the wealthy pay a higher

marginal tax rate with the operative word being marginal. Typically, wealthy Americans have a

much lower effective tax rate as they have the financial means to employ shrewd accountants

and tax attorneys who find and leverage the many deductions buried within the language of the

70,000+ pages of our current tax code. These are a multitude of deductions of which average

citizens are unaware. A prime example of someone able to lower his or her effective rate of

taxation is the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney. According to CNN Money, Mitt

Romney made $21 million dollars in one year, but only paid an effective rate of fifteen percent,

which was far lower than the rate he should have paid. Our progressive tax system is one that is

littered with loopholes that allow for the wealthy to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Again,

the loopholes require detective work by qualified attorneys and accountants as the federal tax

code spans 70,000+ of pages of archaic and convoluted text. Not even

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