Dear Editor:

Here’s an eye opening experiment. On tax preparation software (an excellent free spreadsheet is available from excel1040.com) enter the amount of your gross earnings from your w-2. Fill the rest out for your marital status and number of dependents and take note the amount of taxes you owe. Then without changing anything else remove your gross earnings from the w-2 section and enter that number either as qualified dividends or capital gains and take a note of the amount of taxes you owe.

If you were married with two children and earned $123,250, your taxes would be $10,825, but if you received the same amount in qualified dividends or capital gains your taxes would be zero. That’s right, you just paid for some rich guy’s country club dues. And that is not the only tax break that the rich enjoy and we wage earners do not, the tax code is riddled with loopholes and giveaways that the rest of us pay for.

It is  argued that this unfair situation bolsters the economy. That may be true for the rich, but wages have stagnated in the past few decades, and the American Dream has evaporated. If you owned stocks in the Dow Industrial index you would have seen your wealth grow almost 9% annually. How does that compare to your last raise?

These tax cuts for the rich are paid for through borrowing. Our national debt now stands at over 36 trillion with annual interest of 234 billion. This is a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the holders of treasury bonds.

Here is a real kick in the teeth, the Republicans have cut into the IRS resources so deeply that  they cannot effectively audit much of the fraud and abuse by rich guys who, despite these generous cuts, evade paying taxes.

If Republicans were honest about wishing to reduce taxes for the average guy, why not just increase the standard deduction to match that which is given to the rich? Instead we get crumbs from their table while giving their rich donors a free ride.

Fred W. Nehring

Boothbay