Mr. Bush, Tear Down This Tax Code!
Derek Copold
Which of the following do you fear most?
A. Osama Bin Laden.
B. Saddam Hussein
C. John Ashcroft
D. An IRS Agent calling about your tax return.
Excepting the odd Bill Kristol or Lawrence Tribe, we all know the answer to that one. The chances of Osama or Saddam making you go boom in the night are infintesimal, right up there with winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning. As for Johnny A., not even the most odious plank in his criminally misnamed “Patriot Act” gives him the power the IRS now has to make your life a living hell.
Think about it, come April 15, like almost every other American, you drop your return into the mailbox and immediately after that, a cold and queasy feeling starts eating its way through your gut. What if you transposed a number, or lost a receipt? Or what if you draw a foul-tempered IRS Agent in a random audit? Why, you’ll be the star in your very own Kafkaesque drama—where you can savor the nasty irony of being bureaucratically tortured by a man you’ve paid…with your own taxes. Oh, the joy of it all.
I mention this because our dear leader, President Bush, has proposed yet another “stimulus package” for our economy, a sort of Viagra for the Gross Domestic Product, if you will. This little pick-me-up will slash taxes here and there to the tune of about $674 billion dollars over ten years. The Democrats, naturally, can’t stand the thought of letting anyone, let alone the taxpayers, keep their own money, so they’ve made a counter-proposal: handing out $136 billion to society’s most unproductive members, all of whom uncoincidentally vote Democratic come election time. While this measure will boost sales for Nike and Def Jam Records, it probably won’t do much for the economy as a whole. Of course Bush’s won’t either. The economy’s just too large for either party’s tinkering to have any effect.
Now if Dubya really wants to make a difference, and I mean something that’ll win him huge brownie points with the general populace as well as boost the economy, then he ought to fix our damnable tax system. It’s bad enough that citizens are forced to submit to being frisked and frazzled by sub-literate, federally-paid dimwits at the airport while trying to keep track of the color of the day (Quick, what’s Orange?), so why continue having them fill out reams of paperwork every tax season? Why must they check each answer against a guide whose prose is a sure cure for insomnia, all the while afraid of making the some niggling error that could cost them their cars, their houses and/or thousands of dollars in fines?
It’s not as if we lack for ideas. Last decade two Texas Republican congressmen offered two solutions to this problem. Dick Armey of Fort Worth pushed for a flat income tax, and Bill Archer of Houston proposed a national sales tax. As with all proposed reforms, these ideas suffer from their creators’ tendency to oversell their potential benefits, but they are still far more attractive than what we have now. Both proposals would dispense with the volumes of tax regulations which no one, but no one understands (not even the IRS Agents who are supposed to enforce them), and they both go a long way towards freeing Americans from having to live in fear of their own government. These proposals’ basic assumptions make so much sense, when compared to what we have, that there is no good reason for not enacting some reform based on one plan or the other. This is probably why almost everyone in Washington has done their level best to ignore them.
But now there’s a new team in town, or so they say. The GOP controls both Congress and the White House. Okay, here’s a chance for them to prove their mettle. They don’t have to enact either Armey’s or Archer’s plan word for word; just move the system closer to one or other—the flat tax is probably the more realistic option. The main thing is to simplify the code so that the average taxpayer, the man with a house, a pension fund and some stocks, can fill out his tax return without needing help from the boys and girls at H&R Block (who always lobby against any tax simplification—out of the goodness of their hearts, of course!).
The benefits of such a reform are fairly obvious. First, it would reduce the nation’s overall, post-9/11 tensions by returning a bit of security to the average citizen. Second, it would compensate for some of the freedoms Americans are losing due to the fabled War on Terror. (This is why even the Left should get behind some kind of a simplification. They spend so much time worrying about John Ashcroft’s hypothetical abuses in some hypothetical future that they ignore the real abuses going on around them.) Third, the efficiency gained by the citizenry not having to run every financial decision by our modern-day tax-code rabbinate would effectively act as a large tax cut, doing more stimulate the economy than any piddling credit or incentive ever could. Finally, and most selfishly for the GOP, this would be exactly the kind of thing that would boost Republican popularity among the unwashed masses: proof that they are indeed making life better for the common man by doing the only thing the government never seems to want to do these days: get out of his face.
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