Our Threatened Freedom

Are You Filthy Rich on Ten Thousand a Year

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 83-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 083

Dictation Name: Vol. G - Part 05 - Are You Filthy Rich on Ten Thousand a Year

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Are you filthy rich on ten thousand dollars a year? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

I can recall, not too many years after World War 2, hearing someone described as filthy rich, who made 10,000 a year. In fact I once saw an old movie, one of the earliest Cary Grant pictures I think, in which some women described the hero as very rich because he had an income of 5,000 a year. Of course one of my university professors described how rich he felt with his first big job, a 20 dollars a month in gold.

Well, inflation has changed things since then. Everybody knows that expect the taxman. Nowadays 10,000 a year puts one far below the poverty line. No one is filthy rich on that amount. What 5,000 would buy in 1940, 15,000 would not buy in 1970, and certainly not in 1980, ’81 or ’82.

Inflation has gone from 1 or 2 percent to 10 and 15 percent, and everyone’s real income has decreased. Very few of us get pay raises each year equal to the actual rate of inflation.

However the tax rate has not taken inflation into consideration. Thus, as the intellectual activist has pointed out, the man who earned 10,000 in 1972 will, in 1984, be paying 63 percent more in taxes on that same, inflation adjusted income. The Reagan administrations tax break will not too substantially offset this inflationary disaster.

The meaning of this is very clear. In 1940, a man with an income of 10,000 dollars was reasonably well off. A man with 30,000 dollars was doing very well indeed. In 1960, for example, a new home of fairly good construction on a larger parcel cost 10,000. That same house sold in 1980, 20 years later, for two hundred and twenty-nine thousand. The people in that neighborhood made ten to fifteen thousand dollars in 1960. In 1980, they made twenty to thirty thousand dollars, but the value of their houses had gone up many times more, and their taxes, income and property, were outstripping their income.

Of course these people seem to be living as well or better, but are they? In 1940 and1960, these people had very limited debt. Now, in the 1980’s, they are all disastrously in debt, all overburdened with taxes, and skating on thin ice economically. They are all taxed as though they were very rich, even while all of them are beginning to feel poor, as their paycheck buys less and less per dollar, and the taxman hits them for a sizable part of their income.

Taxation has become the modern form of slavery. Slavery means ownership and the involuntary labor of another man. All of us work in involuntary servitude to the taxman about five months every year. This is not freedom nor is it reasonable.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.