The misallocation, this time, is not in the way our tax monies are being spent.

It’s in what our money is not being spent on in lieu of paying those taxes in the first place.

According to a 2018 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey—before the 2017 tax reform bill had been able to percolate into our economy in any serious way—we Americans spent more on the taxes Government exacts from us than we did on food, clothing, and health care combined.

That survey found the average American unit, which consists of both shared and single households, spent an average of $9,000 on federal income taxes last year. Americans also spent an average of $5,000 on social security, more than $2,000 on state and local taxes, and another $2,000 for property taxes.

That’s $3,000 more than we spent on those aggregated necessities.

Aside from a low, flat personal income tax without the exceptions froo-froo currently present, as suggested for corporate taxes (see nearby),  the next tax reform target needs to be on Social Security—whose Trust Fund will be exhausted in a few years, leaving the stark choice of raising payroll taxes (or increasing taxation from other sources) to cover the shortfall, or lowering the payouts to fit within the existing (payroll) tax structure—a roughly 30% reduction in payout for each recipient.

That reform, as I’ve written before, needs to be an elimination of the payroll tax altogether—more wage money left in the hands of the earner, which is especially important for those earning the lowest wages—and privatizing both Social Security and Medicare, and making the payouts for the future benefit of the saver and his family rather than immediate payout to utter strangers. That will leave the saver responsible for his own money and, with his skin on the line, he’ll do a far better job of managing those monies than even the most well-intentioned collection of government bureaucrats ever can.

Oh, yeah: privatization also would eliminate the employer’s payroll tax bite, leaving him more money for R&D, marketing,…