Would you get an ‘IRS’ tattoo to avoid taxes?

Welcome to Tax Day.

What would you do to avoid ever paying taxes again?

Twenty-four percent of Americans would get an “IRS” tattoo; 36 percent would move to a different country; 15 percent would take a vow of celibacy; 11 percent would name their child “Taxes.”

Our angst over April 15 is understandable: 57 percent of us think our current tax rate is too high. Only 34 percent think it’s just right. Surprisingly, 9 percent of us think it’s too low.

Here’s the good news: tomorrow is Tax Freedom Day.  

If you allocated every dollar you earned so far this year to pay your federal, state, and local taxes, your debt would be satisfied tomorrow. Everything you make beginning Wednesday would then be yours.

Tiger Woods’ “stirring triumph”

In what the New York Times is calling a “stirring triumph,” Tiger Woods won the Masters yesterday at the age of forty-three. President Trump called the win “a fantastic life comeback”; President Obama described it as “a testament to excellence, grit and determination.”

While Woods’ fifth victory at Augusta National is historic, it didn’t change history for most of us. That’s because, unless you’re involved with golf professionally, the game is a hobby for you. And hobbies are for our discretionary time. For most people, they are ancillary to our lives, not central to them.

Unfortunately, many Americans view following Jesus in the same way—as a hobby for those who choose it. To change metaphors, we see our relationship with God in the same way we see our relationship with the government: we give him what he requires so he will do what we want him to do.

A taxpayer relationship with God

C. S. Lewis described our compartmentalized lives this way: “The ordinary idea which we all have before we become Christians is this. We take as the starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and interests. We then admit that something…