That was a Canadian article headline a client in Fayetteville, Tennessee just shared with me.

It reminded me of an article I wrote back in July of 2015. Something is very wrong with a system of taxation that takes more from a hard-working man or woman, than it leaves him or her to provide for their family.

Think about it for a moment. Every time our government officials (elected politicians) vote to spend a billion dollars here or two hundred million dollars there, they are putting whatever cause that money is going to, ahead of you and your family. They only have one source of funds, tax money from taxpayers.

There was a time in our country when a family could have one wage earner and one homemaker. The family unit not only survived, but it prospered. And the children that came out of those families took values with them when they went out into the world to make it on their own, values that made our country great and the world a better place to live in.

There have been so many things we’ve lost along the way (I don’t mean to borrow words from the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, Wasted On The Way), and I certainly don’t want to sound like I’m lamenting for the good old days.

These really are the good old days that we live in. If we make it so.

Losing the ability for one parent to stay at home and run the household, which is every bit as much work as going to any job, has had a very negative impact on our society, in my opinion. For the majority of families, both parents must work outside the home to keep up. And a single parent has an enormous mountain to climb.

As I’m writing this blog, Diane Sawyer is doing a 20/20 program on ABC entitled “My Reality: A Hidden America.” The focus of the program is about the decline of the middle-class. ABC said that Diane’s story took a year to film and goes across America. I only watched a few minutes of the program.

If you try to learn the exact definition of “middle-class”, you will find a lot of different answers. The two major factors used by most for criteria are education and income.

If you read long enough, you will most likely come to a conclusion similar to mine. Middle-class has less to do with education and more to do with income. There are a lot of technical trade jobs that pay very well. Income seems to be $50,000 to $150,000 on average to fit the stereotypical middle-class definition.

Let’s don’t get bogged down or distracted by that over-simplified definition of middle-class though. If you live long enough, you will witness a drastic shift because things are changing at a very rapid pace. For example, my water bill at home this past summer was more than my first house payment.

In my 2015 article I asked the question …

“What is the biggest personal expense you will incur in your lifetime?”

In the article I stated that most people answered with “my home.” I further said that, “It is true that your personal residence is most likely the single largest purchase you will make in your lifetime, but it is not the biggest expense you will incur in your lifetime.”

I’ve seen different reports that show the average percent of monthly income devoted to mortgage payments now ranges from 6.5% in Detroit to 29.5% in San Jose, (U.S. Average, 12.6%).

As I’m writing this in 2017, our federal tax brackets range from 10% to 39.6%. Add Social Security Tax, Medicare Tax and State Income Tax and you quickly realize that a full third to one-half of your income goes to taxes! This ignores sales tax, personal property tax, real estate tax, telephone tax and many other taxes.

You can’t make this up! Taxes are higher than mortgages.

In fact, taxes in our United States are higher than any other thing you will pay. The harder you work and the more money you make, the more you will pay, not just in sum total which might be fair, but as a percentage of your income.

That last statement may make me sound like a republican to my democrat friends. Forgive me, but if you want to label me, you will have to use something like my three-year old granddaughter would come up with, DEMO-REPUBA-CRAT-FROZEN.

Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society, that I admit. However, we must control and reel in that price.

Another client that lives in Columbia, Tennessee shared a local newspaper story with me that showed that the Maury County Sheriff  has “a $5 million annual budget for the Maury County Jail and a $6 million budget for the sheriff’s department, Rowland currently oversees more than $11 million.” That is a lot of taxpayer money folks. Especially for the good people of Maury County Tennessee.

And they don’t even have a State Income Tax in Tennessee! Yet.