That's the common refrain whenever someone wants to institute a new tax to pay for their pet project, "Why, it'll only cost you pennies a day..."

Well, those pennies really start to add up. Just looking at my most recent phone bill (columns won't like up):

Residence line: $14.92
Federal Excise tax: 0.63
State tax: 0.59
County tax: 0.20
Federal access charge: 5.00
Federal Univ Svc Fund: 0.56
Colo Univ Svc Charge: 0.41
911 surcharge: 0.11
Total: 22.45

So, on a phone bill of 14.92, I owe $7.53 in various taxes and charges, an effective tax rate of 50.5%.

Add to that all of the other taxes we pay on sales, gasoline, utilities, property, vehicle use, excise, and the dozens of stealth taxes buried in the cost of products (like corporate taxes) and those "pennies a day" really add up. On just the visible taxes alone, my wife and I pay over $40,000 each year and who knows how much more we pay due to the stealth taxes.

Funny how some people accuse me of being greedy because I don't feel inclined to add "just pennies a day" for their pet tax but never consider themselves greedy for wanting ever larger amounts of our family income. Actually, "funny" isn't a good word to describe what's going on.

Those "pennies a day" often have a way of growing. For example, when Medicare was sold to the public in the 1960s, we were told it would only cost us "about 25 cents a day, the price of a cup of coffee." Sure, the price of coffee has gone up since then but the Medicare tax has gone up far faster.

While we're on the subject, few things are more permanent than a "temporary tax". We're still being charged for a tax on long distance phone service that was passed in the 1890s to pay for the Spanish-American War. At the time, only a small percentage of people had phones, so it was sold as a "tax on the rich." For that matter, the income tax was sold to everyone in 1913 as a "tax on the rich", too. "Funny" how the definition of "the rich" eventually gets expanded to include just about everyone in time.