In response to a letter published in the Kirkland Reporter on Dec. 14, which said that “Americans are not overtaxed”: our authors are a writer and an accountant.

Their “truth” is that we are not overtaxed, citing the 1952 tax rates. They omit the Kennedy tax reduction of 1962 that created a surplus of income for the government and the Reagan Tax cuts. Both have been highlighted in recent history as boons to both the economy and the government tax incomes.

What is missing in the letter besides historical perspective is the fact that the Wilson Administration canonized the idea of income taxes with the passage of 16th Amendment. They failed to research the history of the income taxes to find that taxes were cut in the 1920s and then raised by Hoover and FDR to the rates the authors touted as not crippling anyone.

In their frenzied opinion, they dwelled on the balanced budget of the latter part of the Clinton administration that had been written by the Gingrich Congress and the Contract with America proponents, which Clinton hesitantly signed.

I think we need to keep more of our earnings, as we the people spend more of our money per-capita on charitable causes and helping others than we do on the government. Despite the rhetoric regarding government programs that are to lift the poor, we end up with a trillion-dollar boondoggle known as social welfare and realize that we have created generational welfare families and that the percentage of folks attached to welfare fails to fall. So if we look at how much were are taxed and the results of how and where the money is spent, I think it is clear that we are being overtaxed.

Stan Olson,

Kirkland