We are nearing the climax of “tax season.” That’s the problem right there, by the way: Summer should have a season, and baseball should have a season, but not tax. Happily, like candy canes and Christmas-tree lights on December 26th, the TurboTax boxes will soon be disappearing from the display racks until the nights start drawing in and the leaves fall from the trees and tax season begins anew in seven or eight months’ time.

And yet for an increasing number of Americans, tax season is like baseball season: It’s a spectator sport. According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009, 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax. Obviously, many of them pay other kinds of taxes — state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why). Half a decade back, it was just under 40 percent who paid no federal income tax; now it’s just under 50 percent. By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury. In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from “No taxation without representation” to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, and bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers contribute 60 percent of revenue. The top 10 percent provide 75 percent. Another 40-odd percent make up the rest. And half are exempt. This isn’t redistribution — a “leveling” to address the “maldistribution” of income, as Sen. Max Baucus (D., Kleptocristan) put it the other day. It isn’t even “spreading the wealth around,” as then-senator Obama put it in an unfortunate off-the-prompter moment during the 2008 campaign. Rather, it’s an assault on the moral legitimacy of the system. If you accept the principle of a tax on income, it might seem reasonable to exclude the very poor from having to contribute to it. But in no meaningful sense of the term can half the country be considered “poor.” United States income tax is becoming the 21st-century equivalent of the “jizya” — the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens: In return for funding the Islamic imperium, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Likewise, under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the non-believers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity, and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.

In the Islamic world, the infidel tax base eventually wised up. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian tradesmen got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills far from the shakedown crowd. In less mountainous terrain where it’s harder to lie low, non-Muslims found it easier to convert. That’s partly what drove Islamic expansion. Once Araby was all Muslim, it was necessary to move on to the Levant, and to Persia, and to Central Asia and North Africa and India and Europe — in search of new infidels to mug. Don’t worry, I’m not so invested in my analogy that I’m suggesting the Obama-Reid-Pelosi shakedown racket will be forced to invade Canada and Scandinavia. For one thing, pretty much everywhere else got with the Big Government program well ahead of America and long ago figured out all the angles: Two-thirds of French imams are on the dole. In the Stockholm suburb of Tensta, 20 percent of women in their late 40s collect disability benefits. In the United Kingdom, 5 million people — a tenth of the adult population — have not done a day’s work since the New Labour government took office in 1997.