Three years in prison for Wesley Snipes

For trying to evade millions of dollars in taxes that you and I and every other American has to pay.

And you know what? I'm good with that.

The Snipes going to prison part, that is.

I'm not good with the excessive taxation that we're all subject to, thanks mostly to tax-and-spend Democrats trying to buy votes with handouts and bribes that they call "entitlements", and I also blame this current President, George W. Bush for his insane spending on nonessential budget items. But at least Bush had the brains to lower the taxes on the people, which led to increased spending and investment and a higher gross return to the government. Of course Hillary and Obama have each gone on record promising to raise taxes if one of them is elected President. They prefer to keep the Dem plan in effect where they tax the productive people and redistribute the money to the nonproductive (and their rich partisan backers) in exchange for votes.

But I digress. Back to Snipes. This joker hooked up with a couple of other crooks who helped him move his money to other countries and file fraudulent tax returns claiming that he didn't owe taxes because the federal government has no right to collect them. He also told his employees to stop paying taxes, and he tried to defraud the government into giving him back money that he'd already paid in taxes. He did this stuff knowingly and willfully and he knew that it was wrong. He belongs in prison along with his partners and I hope that he serves every day of the three years--one for each year that he refused to file taxes--that he was sentenced to.

Now that said, I still believe that Snipes was taxed too much. I think that we all are, quite frankly. But that doesn't mean that in this nation of laws, we can just defy the law or attempt to perpetrate fraud. What we need to do is demand real reform in Washington and our state governments and elect people who will cut taxes, cut out waste, refuse to accept earmarks and other pork, and eliminate programs and departments that are not central to the job of government--basically national security, courts, and the interstate infrastructure for the feds, and any other programs that each state's voters choose to enact AND PAY FOR without the feds helping them by redistributing the earnings of people in other states. If Massachusetts wants to give everyone health care, let them tax themselves to provide it. People who don't want the obscene tax rates that will follow will move out to other states, taking their jobs, income tax, goods and services with them. Let the states compete for taxpayers and big employers by offering as much or as little as the states' voters are willing to pay for, and let the federal government worry about the few core functions specifically delegated to it by the constitution. (Note: That doesn't include things like Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, and other social service handout departments. Those are all roles that should be filled (and paid for) by the states while the fed focuses on keeping us safe and performing the necessary limited interstate regulatory functions that the founders of this country allocated to it.

Maybe if we got back to the way this country was supposed to work, we all wouldn't end up working half the year just to pay our assorted taxes, most of which go to benefit other people instead of those of us who earn it. I don't begrudge Wesley Snipes his millions of dollars. He earned them, after all. They were his. In a perfect country, hew and you and I and everyone else would be free to keep most of what we earn and use it to enhance our individual lives. But we don't have a perfect country any more. We have one where Democrats and other tax-and-spenders have had control for too long. So until we all work together hard enough to outvote the panderers in Congress and the recipients of all of our lost tax dollars, we're all stuck in the same boat, and that means that we all have to abide by the same rules, and that includes you, me and Wesley Snipes.

It even includes pothead dropouts in Boulder and their over-indulgent rich parents.