Taxed to Death

Dr. Lawrence A. Hunter is president of the Social Security Institute, a 501(c) (4) non-profi t, seniors' advocacy organization. He has written a weekly column for Forbes and regularly published in other major newspapers, periodicals and done research for numerous think tanks. He gives frequent speeches and regularly appears on television and radio. 

During his time in Washington politics, Dr. Hunter was a White House policy advisor to President Ronald Reagan, chief economist of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, chief of staff of the congressional Joint Economic Committee and chief economist, speech writer and political advisor for Jack Kemp at Empower America. Prior to that, Dr. Hunter was an assistant professor at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He is married to Georganna F. Hunter, the father of nine children and seven grandchildren. 


"Magnificent. . .the best single piece that's ever been written on the income tax and the IRS." 

Richard W. Rahn, Ph.D., American Political Economist & Author of The End of Money 


Income taxes are political and economic weapons of mass destruction used by governments on their own people. To paraphrase Chief Justice John Marshall, the power to tax income is the power to subvert society. 

Taxed To Death is both entertaining reading and serious scholarship, written in popular prose for the non-specialist reader. Hunter masterfully weaves together economic analysis, public choice theory, political science, history and journalism into a tapestry that exposes the far-reaching, pernicious effects the income tax and the IRS have had on America during the past century. He demonstrates vividly how income taxation adversely affects not only those who pay the tax but also how it shackles to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder those who earn too little to pay it. 

The IRS is a bureaucratic despot, completely out of control and in principle uncontrollable. But, for all that Americans find loathsome and despicable about the IRS, it is merely the symptom of a larger problem-the income tax itself-and a deeper pathology-a spiritual poverty and an unconquered fear within the American people that produce a craving for the hive-the collective-and a willingness to give up their individuality and God-given rights to become worker bees subservient to the guardians of the "greater good" of the collective, which only they (the guardians) get to define. 

Americans face a choice: Allow the collectivization of America to continue until the process is complete and then wait for the collective to self destruct the way Communism did. Or, Americans can take an important first step now to restore personal privacy, individual liberty and economic opportunity, going right to the core of the problem and demolishing the foundation on which the collective sits by repealing the income tax and the 16th Amendment and abolishing the IRS.