Sure, our tax code is incredibly labyrinthine. After all, the consumer champ’s taxes were 169 pages long this year!

However, our tax rate is actually more favorable now than it’s been in recent decades — as strange as that may sound. The average family pays 9 cents on the dollar in taxes, according to an article in The Washington Post. Meanwhile, a new Gallup poll shows that roughly half of Americans are happy with the level of tax they pay.

In Clark’s case, his financial success means that his tax rate was effectively 34.3% this past year. That’s not particularly low, although it could have been much higher; at other points in our nation’s history, it has actually been as much as 90% for the wealthy!

So if taxes aren’t the real issue with the protests, then what is? The penny-pincher believes it is concern over government spending…and this is not a partisan issue. Former President George W. Bush was a huge spender and the Obama administration looks like it is heading down that same path.

Adding to the general unease people are feeling is the fact that we’ve perverted capitalism with the way both administrations handled bank failures and the collapse of the auto industry.

The banks should have been allowed to go insolvent. That’s why we have the FDIC. But they weren’t and now we’re in a neverland: Are institutions like Bank of America and Citibank private or are they public? Are they serving stockholders or the taxpayers?

Ditto with the auto industry. How absurd is it that President Obama basically fired the CEO of GM after the company got a bailout?! Again, it leaves us in a gray area similar to the bank conundrum.

When you’re sitting at the crux between capitalism and government control, you’re lost in the ozone. Clark compares it to the phrase “you can’t be a little bit pregnant.”

We need a hard restart back to the basic tenets of capitalism. If businesses can’t make a go of it, they should fail and the stockholders should be wiped out. Period.