Saturday, March 03, 2012

"Taxman-uh uh Mr. Wilson"

With the presidential election coming up soon; with the Republican candidates vying to win the nomination; with my buddy, Hootz, extolling the virtues of his paying more taxes, the song "Taxman" by the Fabulous 4 is still relevant today. 

From Wikipedia: 

Harrison said, "'Taxman' was when I first realised that even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes. It was and still is typical."[4] The Beatles' large earnings placed them in the top tax bracket in the United Kingdom, liable to a 95% supertax introduced by Harold Wilson's Labour government.[5] In a 1984 interview with Playboy magazine, Paul McCartney agreed: "George wrote that and I played guitar on it. He wrote it in anger at finding out what the taxman did. He had never known before then what he'll do with your money."
In 1980, Lennon recalled in an interview with Playboy magazine, "I remember the day he [Harrison] called to ask for help on 'Taxman', one of his first songs. I threw in a few one-liners to help the song along, because that's what he asked for. He came to me because he couldn't go to Paul, because Paul wouldn't have helped him at that period. I didn't want to do it... I just sort of bit my tongue and said OK. It had been John and Paul for so long, he'd been left out because he hadn't been a songwriter up until then."

Ian MacDonald praised McCartney's contributions to the song saying his guitar solo was "outstanding" and his bass part was "remarkable"





2 comments:

John said...

Yep, I would be honored to pay a million dollars income tax. It's even better now than it would have been thirty years ago. Back then anyone paying a million dollars might only have a million or less remaining. But with today's taxes that same taxpayer could expect to have four or five million left.

Remember, income tax is only on the last year of taxable income, the source of additional wealth. One's net worth is not affected by income taxes. So most taxpayers in that group are what anyone can call rich by any measure.

Hope you dodged the bullets with all the recent bad weather.

vietnamcatfish said...

I didn't know you posted a comment until just now.

We have been fortunate with the weather-hope you have too.

The country still seems to be equally divided. I saw where a wall street guy was bemoaning the fact that he couldn't make it on $350,000 a year.

And a couple of people who had the good fortune of windfall money wanted to keep their food stamps.

Crazy world or world continuing to go mad!