Former Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall stated that, “The power to tax involves the power to destroy”. This is true enough, but it also involves the power to control.
In fact, control is the number one feature of our tax code, at least in terms of how much of our behavior it controls. This is as opposed to how efficiently it raises revenue while doing the least possible damage to the economy and personal liberty.
Like a hydra, it sits at the center of American life with tentacles that reach into our finances, our politics and – coming soon – our health care.
It is the great enabler of big government, and it makes potential criminals out of everyday Americans who can’t possibly keep up with its over four million words and fifty-five thousand pages of rules and regulations. A code so complicated that it takes a collective 6.1 billion hours to comply with each year, the equivalent of over three million full-time employees and about 170 billion dollars in costs to the economy.
Generally speaking, it is said that if you want less of something, you tax it, and if you want more of something, you subsidize it. With that in mind, our tax code is a veritable road map to what our betters want more and less of.
We tax success, whether in the form of income, capital gains and essentially savings as well. We tax free speech with regulations and the time and resources necessary to comply with them. And of course we subsidize unemployment, poverty, poorly performing government monopoly schools and failing businesses. Trillions later, how’s that been working out for us?
Its primary beneficiaries are accountants, lobbyists, lawyers and the businesses that get the loopholes they want, and the politicians who get contributions for keeping the loopholes in place. In other words, the complexity invites corruption.
Of course such a large, complicated tax code gives rise to a large agency to administer it. And since it is a virtual certainty that everybody is violating some element of it at some time, it becomes a matter of bureaucratic discretion as to whether you’re targeted for enforcement or not.
The more the agency has to regulate, the more it “needs to know” about those it regulates: like your finances, the content of your prayers, your political beliefs, what type of health insurance you have, etc. – all information that can be exploited and shared with others who have no business seeing it. Just ask the Tea Party supporters.
Just this week a Treasury Inspector General’s report revealed that confidential tax records of some political candidates and donors were “improperly” reviewed by the IRS, and that they “targeted for audit candidates for political office”, and that there was “unauthorized access or disclosure of tax records of political donors or candidates”.
But these scandals are mere symptoms of the problem that is our incomprehensible, inefficient, corruption-inducing tax code. All of which presents an opportunity to Republicans, and they should use it to “go big”.
Call for the immediate appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS abuse scandals. Pass a resolution in the House every day if necessary to bring public attention and pressure Obama to make the appointment.
Eliminate the IRS role in Obamacare. Of course that would essentially gut program financially, so Democrats would oppose it, but it would put them on the record voting to keep the IRS involved in American health care, much to the appreciation of the voting public.
Eliminate the IRS all-together and restructure government revenue collection. We upended entire bureaucracies after 9-11, why not now? Further, push for real civil service reform that has real punishment for political favoritism and abuse.
Reform the tax code to eliminate all deductions and lower all rates. Start with a blank sheet of paper and design it like it was on purpose, not the result of some grotesque experiment in regulatory evolution. It would mean easier compliance for taxpayers and less control for bureaucrats. Ignore the howls of protest from lobbyists and adopt a “no loopholes, no exceptions” policy.
Eliminate the corporate income tax, since it is just a pass-thru to the shareholders who own corporations to begin with. This would also have the virtue of eliminating the need to file for tax-exempt status in order to create political speech groups and get the legal protections of a corporation, (the source of the recent IRS abuse of Tea Party groups).
These are all issues that Republicans can use to beat Democrats over the head from here to 2016. Never let a crisis go to waste, remember?
Best case, we actually improve something that desperately needs fixing. Worst case, we put Democrats in close races next year in a really bad spot.
It’s all about preparing the ground we’re going to fight on.
Updating the dead girl, live boy rule
It’s a metaphor for doing something so insanely stupid as to upend politically reality, or at least getting caught doing it. As another former Louisiana Governor Earl Long put it in the movie Blaze, “A politician’s got to be discreet in his indiscretions”.
But being discreet is getting tougher.
Since the dawn of the Internet, along with email and its spawn text messaging, a smart politician with any survival instincts has to know that anything sent to anyone – no matter how trusted they may be at the moment – can one day pop up on the front page of the newspaper, show up on TV, or in the email in-boxes of every voter in their district. Many a job has been lost on account of the “reply all” button.
Further, thanks to the ubiquitous smart phone, virtually everyone everywhere is equipped with a handheld digital camera and voice recorder that can quickly capture that obscene rant at a constituent, or the discreet exit from the no-tell motel with that hot new intern, and post it on Facebook in a matter of seconds.
Despite that, human nature is what it is, and people continue to do dumb things. Add that to a culture that continues to chase the lowest common denominator and you end up with a lot of unfortunately “candid” moments and busted careers. On the bright side, this gives voters a chance to see what they actually got on Election Day, often much to their disappointment.
That said, the “dead girl, live boy rule” has been more than adequate to cover the idiocy of politicians of all stripes up to this point. But every now and then someone comes along who does something so colossally and epically stupid that rules have to be re-written to account for it.
Clearly it’s one thing to get caught doing something foolish, but it’s something else to willfully and repeatedly do so in a self-absorbed, sociopathic and exhibitionist way, especially after you’ve already been busted and drummed out of office for doing it once before. Which brings us to the latest case of Anthony Weiner and what I’ll call the new “Carlos Danger corollary”, which covers using technology in an insanely moronic and reckless way – like taking pictures of yourself naked and intentionally sharing them with someone in a format that is just one mouse click away from being front page news.
So here’s the updated rule: never get caught with a dead girl or a live boy; or take pictures of your junk and send them to people. Politicians, take note.
Now that it’s becoming so much easier to get caught, we’ve got an increasing number of politicians who want second chances; a trail blazed by Bill Clinton and followed by many more ever since. As Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey recently put it, “when voters don’t take public service more seriously than entertainment we end up with clowns”. Maybe that’s why they keep asking for another chance. They know how low the standards have fallen.
And you can’t really mention these guys without also mentioning the women who enable them by publicly standing by them, excusing them, and in effect asking voters to excuse them as well. It’s like they have decided that, no matter how embarrassed they may be, no shame is worth losing access to political power.
Why are these women willing to allow themselves to be used like this? And, at the risk of being sexist, what’s the line on how many men we will see “standing by their women” in similar situations? (I’ll take the under)
Of course the intrepid feminist who blazed this trail of self-sacrifice was none other than the Democrats’ prospective 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton. And now we have Weiner’s wife, Huma, who has set the new feminist degradation record for standing by her man not once, but twice. (He’s really, REALLY straightened out this time!)
Maybe we need a new “Human Shield rule” of politics, stipulating that you can possibly save your husband’s career by throwing your dignity on a political grenade just once.
Beyond that, your credibility is gone along with your self-respect.