Are taxes in America too low, or too high? That's a trick question, of course. The taxes on the rich are always too low but too high for the rich, but the rich don't actually pay taxes, so it all turns very epistemological.

I mean, our taxes are far too high, because the government has enough money to go and wage foreign wars of choice (and not even good choice!) as our nation's cities crumble to pieces and all our municipal employees are laid off and the services that Americans actually expect to receive from their taxes are alarmingly neglected. The nation's mayors even signed a toothless and tepid resolution on this very topic! So in that sense, America's taxes are so high that they're killing the entire world, by extension.

On the other hand, our taxes are far too low, because look, we can barely even afford to buy things from China any more. From China, where all the shit is cheap, in the first place! If you want to keep the American government rolling in plastic gewgaws and mounds of Chinese-issued IOU's, you damn well better pony up a heftier sack of loot to the IRS, brother! Do you know what happens when haughty first-world nations start thinking they're "too big to fail," and all that claptrap? You end up like London, where everything is so expensive that no regular people can afford to live there, and also you're broke from paying to put on the god damn Olympics, and next thing you know a million foreign tourists are there watching the Olympics but no regular people can even watch it, and when everybody leaves you're even more broke!

Don't be like that. Pay your taxes, America.

Unless you're rich, in which case every dollar you pay in taxes represents a tightening of the noose around the neck of America's vital flow of private capital.

[Photo: AP]