A Nine-Year Old's View on Federal Taxation

The other day I was driving my nine year old son to school.  Not too far from our home, and on the route to school, the United States government is building a very large NSA building, which we refer to as the Spy Building.  We started talking about the building.  There is no actual structure at this point; just a lot of land preparation, with dozens of large tractors driving all over the place.  I explained to my son that all the work that has been done to this point, in just preparing the land for construction, has probably already cost several millions of dollars.  He asked who paid the money and where the money came from.  I told him the money came from taxes. 

Prior to this moment, I had never discussed taxes with my son, with the exception of trying to teach him that he needed to have an extra 7 cents for every dollar he planned to spend.  On this short car ride, I began a brief explanation of taxes.  I premised my discussion by saying, “If you ever want to be rich, you have to understand about taxes.”  I went on to explain that we are taxed when we buy anything at the store; we are taxed on money that we earn money; we are taxed for owning a house or a car; and we are taxed when we die.  For three or four minutes, I continued explaining tax disbursement to the multiple levels of government we have.  My tone was not negative, as I was trying to give him a subjective overview of all the taxes we pay.

After I finished my brief discourse, there was a moment of silence.  Then my son made his profound statement.  As I noted, I had not talked about taxes with him before, except telling him he has to pay sales tax.  He said, “I don’t want to be rich right now.”  In the past, he always told us that he wants to be rich and live in a mansion, so I asked why he didn’t want to be rich.  He responded, “Now is not a good time to be rich, not until we get another president, because this president wants to take too much money from you in taxes if you’re rich.”

After that I didn’t say anything; I was too astonished at discovering that my nine-year old had already formed an opinion about the tax plans of the current administration to say another word.