The Income Tax is Un-American

0:00My talk tonight is The Income Tax is Un-American, and that's kind of a bold statement given that the income tax is in our Constitution, that it is almost 100 years old, and that Americans have been paying the income tax by the millions for those many years. Now, I'm an economist, but I'm going to first start out by telling you what libertarians think of the income tax. Libertarians view the income tax very negatively in an ethical, moral context. Most importantly, libertarians view the income tax as theft, that income taxation represents the government taking your money from you.

0:51It's not a voluntary mutually beneficial exchange. It's an exchange where one party uses power to dominate the other. It's an exchange where one party uses the threat of guns, of imprisonment, of confiscation of assets in order to coax you into paying your income taxes. So, it's not a regular voluntary exchange that you and I do on a regular basis. It's a coerced exchange where the government takes money from you, an arrangement which none of us have agreed to. Okay, so that if I were to give you $100, that would be a mutually beneficial exchange.

1:40If you were to give me $100, that would also be a mutually beneficial exchange. But if I was to say I'm going to take $100 from you or that I have a friend who's right now in your apartment stealing all your stuff, okay, he's going to take $1,000 out of your wallet or your checking account or something, that's not a mutually beneficial exchange, that's theft. And the idea that we all agree to it, even if that were true, that doesn't make it any Less or More Ethical or Moral Just because the people on this side of the room dominate the people over in this corner doesn't mean that they can decide, well, yeah, let's take some of their money and then divide it evenly amongst the group or divide it evenly amongst themselves.

2:36Just because it's a larger act of more people agreeing and then taking money away from people at large doesn't make it any more moral or ethical. Because your taxes are withheld from your paycheck, in addition to being theft, it represents confiscation. The government confiscates your money until April 15th rolls around when you actually Libertarians also see the income tax as a mechanism of social control, where the government is controlling your lives very directly and very forcefully in numerous different ways.

3:41And even if that control was beneficial, libertarians wouldn't like it. We believe that people are free individuals. They should get to do and choose what they themselves want to and take Let's look at the tax code. Well, in innumerable ways does it distort our decisions in everyday life, although we very often don't see the income taxes doing the distortions, but certainly we all realize that because of the tax benefits of owning a home exists, and were actually increased in the past few years, The economy is telling us exactly the opposite. In the old days, when people were born and lived and died in the same hometown, buying a home was obviously the logical thing to do.

4:55choice, especially with the tax break in place. But nowadays, people go away to college, they go get a new job, very often that job may mean transferring from one city to another. So the idea of home ownership is somehow some kind of predestined ideal is simply wrong and libertarians say we need to let people choose. Let's look at health care. Health insurance, when it's paid by your employer, means it comes to you as a tax benefit. Because the employer is paying for it, you're not getting the money and then buying the insurance with after-tax dollars.

5:44So the tax code has artificially shifted us into employer-provided health care rather than individual-purchased health care. Guess what? That means the individual doesn't get to decide. Some large firm, some large corporation decides the package that's going to be offered. In fact, it's such a tax dodge that insurance itself has changed. When I was born, so many centuries ago, individuals bought catastrophic health insurance, which meant if you had a baby or you had a heart attack or you had cancer or you had your appendix out or something and you went to the hospital, the insurance would pay the bills.

6:33Because of the tax benefit, health insurance has evolved into comprehensive health care so that every doctor's visit, every prescription, every little piece of medical equipment goes through the insurance industry. So all our medical decisions, all of our health decisions have been changed because of that. And this is a case where the government is supposedly presenting us or providing with us, encouraging us through the tax code that's supposed to benefit us. But guess what? It's just the opposite. So now I'm going to put my economist hat on and show you why that's the case.

7:21Let's think about it. Health insurance. You've got a little card that you may have purchased from the university, or your parents gave it to you, or your employer gave it to you. And anything you want in terms of health care, they say you give them the card, right? And it doesn't really matter after that too much. You may have to pay deductibles, you may have to make some co-payments. But the co-payment is $20 or $25. If you've got strep throat, you pay $25. If you have a heart attack, you're basically going to be paying $25. So the economic decision between you and your doctor and your hospital and your other healthcare professionals has removed Bargaining has removed the price system from health care. It's taken you completely out of it. You don't decide what treatments you get anymore. The health insurance company decides what treatments you get. The doctor may seem like he's offering his own ideas and his own diagnosis and treatment.

8:43Those are being ruled by the insurance business and, of course, the government agencies as well. So guess what? If you're just paying $25 or you've got this card, are you more or less likely to seek healthcare assistance? Yeah, it's gotta be more. I mean, if it was, you pull a card out to get something, or you pull your wallet out and take out real money, well then all of a sudden, the first thing people do is ask, how much is it? How much is this going to cost me? Is this prescription $4 or is it $256? With insurance, you don't care.

9:35Another thing that this health care, government health care created system of insurance and Medicaid and Medicare has done is it's created a social safety net for people. That sounds like a good thing too, right? I'm trying to pick some of the best good things and then make them sound as they really are, bad things for people, bad things for America. Well, when you put a social safety net of health care underneath people, I'm not saying that you would do this necessarily, but what would a lot of people do if they knew they, no matter what, you've got Medicaid, Medicare, you've got maybe private insurance, but everybody Everybody knows basically that you can go to the hospital, to the emergency room and get treated, right?

10:29You're in a car accident, you overdose on alcohol or drugs, you name it, get in a fight, get stabbed. That social safety net means that we can act irresponsibly and probably get away with it. We can probably drive drunk, get into a car accident, and get away with it in many cases. Because you know the government's got that ambulance. You know that government's going to pay for that emergency room. So we all act irresponsible towards our health because of that social safety net.

11:20I shouldn't say everybody, but many people do. And it shows. The American population is overweight. Ten percent of the adult population is considered alcoholic. Another good percentage of them use illegal drugs and drive. So there's a lot of irresponsibility and a lot of that is because of the tax system and what it does. Of course, the government also controls us socially through the tax code by the fact that they spend money in a very large number of different ways.

12:11So libertarians don't like the income tax. And when we go back to the founding of this country, we see that the founders of the United States also did not like the income tax, that it was morally unacceptable. Okay, this was certainly true in the American Revolution. fought the world's most powerful empire without an army really, without a navy, because of their power to tax. And the taxes themselves were really, really small. It was just that they had taken the initiative, the British had taken the initiative to establish their The American people understood this because the people who moved to America and formed the colonies were leaving European nations that were oppressive.

13:20They wanted to get away from that. That's why they took the chance of coming here, is to get away from exactly that type of oppressive, intrusive government. The Articles of Confederation, the first form of government in the United States, did not allow the federal government to have any power to tax. It had no power to tax. It simply said that the federal government, the national government can request contributions from the state governments. and so they would say small states we need this amount, large states we need this amount, and then the states themselves would comply voluntarily to those demands.

14:07The U.S. Constitution provides no authority for the federal government to tax our incomes initially. There was no authority in the U.S. Constitution as written by the founding fathers to provide for an income tax. It was written specifically against the idea of an income tax. The federal government could tax imports, it could raise fees on federal roads, and it could charge people for postage, and it could impose certain excise taxes, like on alcohol. And as a matter of fact, the Supreme Court regularly backed that up for more than a hundred of Years of denying the federal government the right to impose a federal income tax so that even if the House and even if the Senate concurred and even if the President signed a bill that imposed an income tax, the Supreme Court always called it null and void as unconstitutional.

15:15President Lincoln got away with it during the American Civil War as an emergency war Now, across the political spectrum to the other side, that's the American side, now we're going to go back a little bit more towards Europe, and the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Now we're going to go back a little bit more towards Europe and the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Frederic Engels. And if you look at the Communist Manifesto written in 1848 by those two gentlemen, the forefathers of communism, In their 10-point program to bring about the socialist revolution, they call for a progressive income tax.

16:15A progressive income tax in the sense that the more money you make, the higher the rate, which is basically the type of system we have today. It's not a flat tax. It's a progressively higher rates for higher incomes. And I encourage each and every one of you, it's got to be on the web some place, to look for the Communist Manifesto, it's very short, and then to look at the ten-point program of the Communist Manifesto and see what you see in there, in your country, the United States. They called for all sorts of things that we did not have at the time, but that we do now.

17:01Things like a central bank we did not have, we do now. Things like public education. There was no public education in 1848 to speak of. Of course there is today. The communists were are joined by the socialist, the fascist, and socialist of every sort, basically, in calling for a progressive income tax. Here in the United States, a group known as the progressives, which came to be fairly prominent in the first part of the 20th century, also supported a progressive income tax. The Progressive Era lasts from the first through the second decade in the United States, where the Constitution was changed in a variety of ways, including the 16th Amendment.

18:00The 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution authorized an income tax in the United States for the first time, and it certainly was progressive. The more you make, the higher the tax, the higher the tax rate, it actually applied initially to very few people, only the super wealthy actually came under the umbrella of the progressive income tax as it was intended. There is some question as to whether or not the 16th Amendment was actually officially correctly passed, but I will pass on that issue here tonight.

18:50One interesting part of the whole debate, however, was that opponents of the income Income Tax wanted there to be included in the amendment a statement to the effect that the income tax rate could never rise above 10%. So the income tax could never rise above that level. And the proponents of the legislation said, oh, don't be ridiculous. It would never, ever get that high. We would never allow the income tax rate to ever approach 10%. And started out as only a couple of percent and only on those who would be making today several hundreds of thousands of dollars. So that 10% limit was never included. And it's too bad for taxpayers because within a couple of years, the income tax rates had passed 10% and of course would go far beyond that level. Today, the upper brackets are in the and Low 40%, but we've seen marginal tax rates higher than 70%.

20:06And then during World War II, the withholding aspect of the income tax was put into place. This meant that as you got a paycheck that your employer would remove part of your pay and give it to the government. This is where the confiscation of income enters into the system. And of course, you think about today, prior to World War II, the income tax was pretty small still, and applied to a small number of people. Then they put this withholding aspect into the income tax, and during World War II, the marginal tax rates increased significantly, and the number of people who were actually The average family of a couple making the average median income in the United States, if there was no withholding tax on that average family, they would be writing a check tomorrow for more than $6,000.

21:21Now when you think about it, that would make a lot of people mad. A lot of people that I know who are normal, level-headed people, when they all of a sudden realize, like tonight, how much they've actually paid in total taxes, they're up in arms about it. They want to talk to me about it, and what can I do to not pay $6,000? Unfortunately, they've been kind of lulled into submission because of this withholding tax. One thing I think is very important to understand is tax reform. It's a big issue in the presidential campaign. Mike Huckabee wanted to impose the fair tax, which is a flat tax, on consumption. And then the battle between the current Democrats and Republican is that the current Democrats want to raise the marginal tax rates by withdrawing The Bush Tax Cuts, John McCain was against the Bush Tax Cuts but now supports them.

22:41Well basically what I want to tell you here tonight is that tax reform is a scam. You can't improve the system with marginal tax reform measures. When people in Washington DC talk about tax reform, it's a scam. They're scamming the voters into thinking they're going to get something out of this. But what it's really a scam about is the people in Congress who are talking about these measures. You know what happens when they start talking about the tax code? Just try to think. What would What would happen if senators and congressmen were gathering together to rewrite the tax code?

23:32Yeah, and their friends. And so money starts to flow into Washington D.C. at warp speed. People who would benefit from the changes are given money, and people who are being The people who are on the tax writing committees, the money starts flowing in like crazy. It's a giant campaign contribution mechanism and they've basically been, quote-unquote, reforming the tax code about every three or four years, ever since it went into being.

24:20They've come along and they've adjusted the marginal rates and they have adjusted the deductions in a significant way. They actually play around with a lot more, but the reforms are about every three to four years, just enough to refill those campaign coffers. But the system never gets any better. The rates and the amount of money that it's taken out of our pockets almost never goes down. Collectively, it's never gone down. And it only gets more and more complicated as they write in special provisions for this group or that group.

25:03I've got a PhD in economics. I was a business major as an undergraduate. I've taken intermediate accounting courses, level accounting courses. I can no longer do my taxes. I mean, I could go into TurboTax and fill in some numbers. But I've already tested myself out. And I didn't pass. And I've asked people who've worked for the IRS questions. I've called the IRS with questions. In about a third of the cases, I never got an answer. And about another third, they gave me the wrong answer.

25:52And the final third, they were able to either answer simple questions or they gave ambiguous answers. And of course, if you ask a question and they give you an answer and you get it wrong on in your taxes because they gave you the wrong information, you're still liable. So it's getting worse. It's not getting better. And that has been the trend trajectory from the beginning of the income tax to the present. If you wanted to go back and study the history Give the tax code, which I really don't suggest you do, but if you did, or just go back to the very beginning and look at it, amazingly simple, we would all kill to have that kind of an income tax.

26:50It's so different. Now speaking of apples and oranges, one of the things I wanted to talk about tonight, Because I think it is important is the fair tax. You could substitute in the flat tax, but any tax reform that's basically designed to simplify the system, to make everybody pay roughly the same amount or in percentage terms, but to not change the amount of revenue essentially coming into the government. This is more of an apples to apples type analysis. First of all, I have a hard time imagining a simple tax reform ever passing. The current people who write our tax legislation simply have too many friends, have too many favors. It's the idea where they would take away deductions from some group and give the money away to other groups. I just don't see that happening.

28:03Second of all, I don't really see even the theoretical possibility of a simple tax reform. If you had a sales tax instead of an income tax, and that sales tax was 23% and you add Add that on to the local tax, a sales tax of 8%, and so you're talking about a sales tax of 31%. And the proponents of this are saying, we can get rid of the IRS. Well, you may be able to get rid of some of the IRS, but the guys with the guns are still We're also going to have to be there, because believe me, people will be cheating on that system in a major league way.

28:54I mean, if you can cut the price of something by 30% just by paying cash, people are going to do that. I mean, right now as it is, 40% of Americans admit in opinion polls that they either have cheated or regularly cheat on their income taxes. It just goes to show you how stupid we are. Why would you admit to a perfect stranger that you regularly break the law? I mean, I would personally feel like I might be talking to an IRS agent. That's why I always pay my fair share of taxes.

29:47I have an analogy here about the fair tax and the flat tax. And basically, imagine a world where we grow apples. And one group of people argue that the way to properly pick an apple is to start at the bottom of the tree and then work your way up. And then get back down off the ladder, Move it over, start at the bottom, and work your way up. And then get down, move the ladder, start at the bottom and work your way up. But the other group says, no, what you should do is start at the bottom and work your way around the whole tree.

30:43And then once you get all the way around, then go up to a higher level and come back and get all of these apples. and then aggressively move yourself around an up tree going sideways rather than up and down. And that's basically the same type of debate between the current system of the income tax or the fair tax or the flat tax.

31:12We do know something that one of those methods has to be more efficient. We might not be sure about which one is more efficient, but we probably can presume that one's going to be better than the other. But the problem with the income tax is not how How to Most Efficiently Collect the Tax The problem with this world of apple growers is that the income tax means that we collect and go out and pick 100% of the apples and then we destroy 50% of them.

32:03And as a matter of fact, we have to pay about five to ten percent of our remaining apples to the people who destroy our apples for us. That's what the income tax does, or that's what the fair tax and the flat tax does. It says we're going to take half of all of our production and we're just going to bury it. We're going to burn it. We're going to roll it over instead of eating it. I would rather have even used a less efficient method of doing something as long as we get the whole 100% of the apples.

32:49So what libertarians argue is that we're not going to argue over what's the best way to What libertarians argue is that this theft process is immoral from the get-go, and that it has terrible consequences in our economy and in our lives. It makes us less free. It takes away our labor from us. It then tells us what to do, how to spend our lives, how to live, how to take care of our health, and thousands of other things that you can't imagine until you actually are faced with the income tax in your lives, in your businesses.

33:47It does all of that, so libertarians want to scrap the income tax entirely because it's not American, it doesn't represent the American way of life. Now of course the question is, can it be done? Well constitutional amendments are hard things to overturn, but the 18th amendment to the Constitution was overturned, alcohol prohibition was seen by the majority of people as being wrong and wrong-headed. And it wasn't the drinkers. The drinkers were against it from the get-go. It was business people who saw what it was doing to their business, what It was mothers. Mothers united into an organization. I can't remember what the name of it is. Mothers against alcohol prohibition or something like that. Because they saw what it was doing to

35:33and so prohibition was passed and then repealed once people figured out that it was wrong and wrong headed. And I think that there are a lot of people, in fact the majority of people now see that income tax is at least wrong headed. I think that is perfectly clear. What a lot of people don't understand is just, it's wrong. And that it's not American. And it can be done. If we got rid of the income tax today, we would have to cut the federal budget back to the year 2000. Eight years ago, if we had those spending levels, we could take every dollar of the income tax that is collected and not collected.

36:25That's how much spending has increased from 1.9 trillion dollars in the year 2000 to 3.1 trillion dollars in the current budget year. That difference between 1.9 and 3.1 is actually slightly larger than the amount of revenues currently collected by the income tax. So the income tax makes up a little bit between about 35% of federal expenditures. So it's not eliminating federal government, but it's a good start. And that's what libertarians hope to achieve in the future.

37:11And to that end, we hold an annual April 15th tax day protest in front of the post office on the Olopoleika Highway. And initially I was kind of timid about going to these tax protests. I mean, the students, okay, yeah, but faculty shouldn't really be out there, right? But over the last several years I've just had a great time going to these tax day protests. We've been on TV, we've been in the newspaper, and we hold signs that say a number of different things, but the most popular one is, honk if you hate taxes.

37:59And the noise level out there can get pretty high, especially at the lunch hour, and then between five and six o'clock when everybody's going home, almost everybody honks in favor of us.

39:14in the Income Tax because they don't pay taxes themselves and their job is paid for by the income tax. So obviously there is a lot of opposition within government employees especially and people who have more or less a direct benefit from the income tax. But I want you to know today that the founding of this country and the founders of this country dramatically opposed any idea about the income tax and that's why I think it's un-American and I think you should and one day I think we can do something about it. Thank you very much.

40:00Sure, I'd be happy to. I'd be happy to if you have any. I can't offer any tax advice, 11 a.m.

41:06No, that's a very valid point. We do implicitly accept it. You know, I pay my taxes even though I think it's an immoral, unethical system, and we don't see the real true nature of it unless you have run afoul of the system. Unless you have tried to oppose this system, unless you have said, you know, I didn't agree to this, nobody here agreed to it, and yet we still have it. And then you see the guns come out, and you see your assets confiscated.

41:52Without trial, even, I mean, all this stuff takes place prior to any type of normal adjudication system. You know, if they think you have run against their rules and regulations, they not only use force, but they use punitive force. I mean, they take you down in terms of your assets and your access to your debit card, just like that without a trial and so that's where the that's why we see it as sort of implicit agreement because normally well we just go along with it but if we didn't then we would see the the type of force that's involved that it is force it is coercive and it is a vindictive type of force it's not you know gee can't we all get along here it's we're coming down on you and we're putting you out before anything has actually been adjudicated. So it has a kinder face but it also has one that's very menacing.

43:17Well, you know, in surveys of Americans, where they're asked to list the programs, the government, and the environmental services that they deem most necessary, most essential. Ninety percent of those respondents indicated that most, in fact all, almost all of the ones that they listed were local government services.

44:03Police, fire, trash collection, you know, things, you know, courts, jails. None of that is paid for with the income tax. is paid for by local taxes and while all taxes are coercive libertarians are reasonable in the sense that well the more local they are the better the lower the rates the better the more chance that citizens have to actually impact the determination of taxes the better you know I get to I've gotten to vote on A lot of property taxes here in Auburn, sales tax increases, property taxes, they have to send me a notice that they're raising my property values.

44:50I get to go to court and present evidence that they're wrong and I'm right. And so people think of, you know, the income tax is government, and if it went away, government will go away. but none of the government that they really like and see as important would go away to any great extent. Everything that the government does has been done by the private sector for a long time and in a variety of different ways. In the United States in the colonial period and beyond, most roads were done by private companies and not just easy roads but really hard roads were done by private companies.

45:38Until the 1930s, almost all of welfare or assistance for the poor was done by the private sector and that has gotten increasingly sort of pushed out of the way. So everything that the government does now do, the private sector has It's already done prior to this and could easily come back in and fill in any gaps that were missing once the federal income tax was removed. Obviously, a lot of policy decisions would have to be different. Stationing 150,000 American soldiers in South Korea would have to be rethought. for 50 years, basing 150,000 American soldiers in South Korea, which could wipe out North Korea with both hands tied behind its back.

46:36A lot of those more sensible decisions would have to be met, would have to be made if you took the income tax away. Things would have to go, and things would have to be prioritized. In today's world, we increase taxes, we increase the national debt, we print up money to pay for whatever is left over, and we never make any hard decisions. We never make any decisions saying, what's more important? It's just more, more, more, and things tend to get worse, worse, and worse from my perspective.

47:19The federal government is funded a lot by the federal government itself. The state governments are like franchise restaurants for the federal government. They're just the local operator. I think a lot of decisions would have to be looked at and agencies, departments would have to be considered for termination and the Department of Education is one where I think what it does is does not only not help private schools, it actually makes it more more difficult for them to achieve their goals.

48:19People have suggested, and I think rightly so, eliminating the Department of Energy and the Department of Homeland Security. People have suggested that bringing troops home, we have American troops stationed abroad in 151 countries around the world. I didn't even know there were 151 countries around the world until I read that article. And you know, I think that's probably the most stupid form of spending, is to take American money and spend it on soldiers in a different country, because that makes the local leaders look kind of like puppets to their population, plus we're spending our dollars in their country.

49:07It seems like if you're going to spend it on soldiers, spend it here. And then if you did need to send them someplace, well, you can just pick your choice. But keeping soldiers in every country permanently doesn't make a lot of sense to me, so I think a lot of that would have to come undone as well. Well, Congress would have to make those determinations, but I think the candidates for cutting are extremely large, both in terms of whole programs, whole agencies, but also in terms of just cutting back on certain things and making other things run on their own, like the post office.

50:02You know, they made the post office run on its own. There was no more federal subsidies for that. They could certainly do that for Amtrak and they can do it for a hundred other agencies that could live off of their own revenues. So they could be completely cut off. I worked in the governor's office in Alabama for the state banking agency. Agency. And I was the assistant superintendent of banking. And we ran off the charges that we made to the banks. We didn't, we never had one penny of tax dollars, which makes me feel, you know, me sort of a hardcore libertarian and working for the state government was, I was little upset about, not upset, after all I was just getting some of my money back but we never took a penny from the taxpayers we charged the banks to inspect them so we set regulations they they had a chance to comment on the regulations and then that would be put forth to for approval and in order to be

51:16chartered at the state level instead of the federal level they would have to be We regulated, someone would have to go into the bank and count the money and oversee their loan portfolio and all that kind of stuff and we would get paid a fee as a result of that. So we ran completely independently, we had a very good working relationship with our banks because our banks could come to us or they could come to the federal regulators were their charter. And so if we were good to them and we had a good working relationship with them, they would come to us. If we tried to impose some stupid regulation, they would switch over to the feds. And that's how libertarians would like, if we're going to have any kind of government intrusion, those are kind of some of the ways in which we can make life more cooperative and more harmonious rather than having one of coercion and monopoly dictating to everybody.

52:24That's what we want to see, at a minimum, achieved here in the United States. Yes. Let's see. Okay, in the year, in the year 2000, 1.8 trillion dollars of spending, well I do know that they took in 1.2 trillion in 2008 and I I think, what was the year you were asking for?

54:00I would just be guessing. I would just be guessing. You can go to the United States Federal Budget on Wikipedia or the Treasury Department, though, and get all those numbers. Numbers. Although you have to be careful. There's a lot of numbers and there's a lot of different ways in which they present them. So you have to be very, very careful about what numbers you're talking about. I did spend a little bit of time today making sure I had a few correct numbers. And it's pretty amazing. Pretty amazing amounts of money involved in all that.

54:55Are there ways to eliminate the national debt and keep up with the state's aeronautics and that factor?

55:25The last one I heard but did not read, so I can't tell you what the source was or if it's valid, was 60 trillion dollars. And that's really a hole that we probably aren't going to get out of. I would like to think that if we started today, you know, and cut all sorts of government spending and cut taxes and made everything more efficient that somehow we could grow I don't know our way out of it, but I'm pretty skeptical about that. The estimates from economists at MIT, as well as the general accounting office of the federal government, Come up with numbers like we would have to cut spending in half and increase tax rates by 50% starting today in order to somehow erase out $60 trillion in these future liabilities.

56:31Of course, we could also just renege on them. We can just say, you know, all you old people, we just can't take care of you anymore. You're on your own. And we're probably going to do a lot of that. We're probably going to do a lot of inflation at the Fed, because you can inflate away debt. You can inflate away liabilities just by making the dollars less valuable. Yeah, yeah, there's no easy way out of this, there's no good way out of it, and I don't really see, you know, logically I could sit down and draw out a plan that might work, but they don't listen to me.

57:24to me. They don't listen to us over there. We started calling the housing bubble in 2003, you know, when long before anybody else had noticed it, we actually said that the housing bubble in the home building stocks was over in 2000, mid 2005, and anybody who talked about the housing bubble on TV or whatever would be shouted down as saying, oh, that's of Business, that there would be a housing bubble and home prices. Home prices never go down. Real estate is a great investment. We were calling the end of that bubble aspect in the stock market at that point. So no one listens to, to a great extent, to economists of the Austrian School. They prefer mainstream, main street marketing type economists to tell a story. And so this message about the income tax or that message about the housing bubble doesn't really get out that effectively. The main street media doesn't ever put it out I've been out there until very recently and people just haven't been listening to us, which is why I'm so appreciative that you came here to listen to me tonight. Thank you very much.