Income tax blues

Just finished paying my income tax. Ugh! What a chunk of money that I would have rather used to buy stuff for me. Shall I join the army of tax grumblers who resent “their money taken from them” by the government? Shall I grumble about the purported 50 per cent of the U.S. population that pays no income tax?
What? Fifty per cent--how can that be? I don’t think that it’s just those who “forgot” to pay their taxes like Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle and possibly many thousands like them still under the radar screen. Face it, that 50 percent must be made up of millions of very low income citizens.
We can easily do the numbers. One is required to pay income tax if his/her income exceeds the standard deduction plus personal exemption. Looking at the 2011 tax tables, this would mean that a single person starts paying taxes on an annual income of $9400; a family of four would start paying taxes on an income of $26,400—barely above the poverty level defined as $22,314. Some large families might be more exempted from paying income tax due to the Earned Income Credit, but they are still not living in luxury.
Think about those numbers. How can a family of four earning under $26,400 provide for the health care needs, college education and retirement of the parents in addition to the other costs of living? Or how can a single man or woman earning under $9400 afford to acquire the skills needed to upgrade his or her earning power? If we really have half of our population living below those incomes, are we not a banana republic?
Aside from compassion that we might have for low income people, the effect on the economy of that many low income people is detrimental. If this segment of the population could have more income, it could spend more for goods and services made by our economy. This would create jobs and make the economy prosper and grow.
Considering all this,I won’t grumble; I keep quite a bit of my income, around 91 per cent. (Which, by the way, is income I might not have earned if I didn’t live in a country with such a dynamic and balanced economy). Furthermore, if the Government relied on our taxes to pay for its expenses, my tax bill would be a lot higher; but 35 per cent of Government’s expenses are paid for by borrowing and passed down to my descendents to repay. Shame!