It is very difficult to understand today's GOP leadership and the rank and file who are holding the feet of the GOP leadership to the fire. They are on a seemingly nihilistic course. How could a political party with any utilitarianism or practical wisdom at all threaten the faith and credit of the United States to achieve internal policy goals? We can talk all day in our own niche about the fragmentation of American culture into radical niches through the positive feedback of today's media. Everyone makes a profit by reflecting people their own latitudes of acceptance and reinforcing present attitudes instead of engaging self critically. It's easy to say that the modern GOP's delusional quest to solely define tax policy is the first simulacra mob act, but the result is not going to be a TV show. Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away. We are all going to be poorer if this way of politics wins, even those of us who own businesses and have a lot of loot. How do you dialogue with radicalism? Obama tries moderation. I try moderation with the conservatives from my high school I've reconnected with after twenty years on Facebook. I tried moderation with the other business owners at my office park. What I find is that people have complicated ideas that seem to make even talking at all feel fundamentally undermined. Though both sides have developed a paranoid style, there are a few islands of agreement. One thing everyone agrees on, though, is the need for a fairer, simpler tax code.
Being one of the few, the proud, who volunteered for Jerry Brown in 1992, back when he was running against Bill Clinton, I learned to love the benefits of a simplified, or flat tax system. If you defend something long enough, it becomes your own attitude. That's like a rule of social psychology, though I wouldn't recommend his plan today. There would be no way to have a Family Bill of Rights at the same time, being that we're all so proud of ending welfare and all that.
Being a previous flat tax proponent, I even try to like the fair tax of Linder and Boortze, but I just can't get behind it. For one thing, they suck. I'm a dyed in the wool Democrat. This makes me naturally alert to see Linder's proposals in their bad conscience, always selling and obfuscating. Linder is a phlegmatic Gingrich, and the Fair Tax groups are self conscious in preventing the investigation of his own ideas.
As a self employed person I know it'd be pretty easy to evade a point of sale retail tax with a business card. This makes me worry that it would lead to just as much administrative invasion as schedule C. I just can't get a clear picture the fair tax world. I could get behind a solid flat tax proposal that is respectful of facts and data, though I'm also in favor of much more public investment in education, shelter, health care, and food security for the poor, so I would want those things together, and none of my fair tax friends at the meetings would agree with me. I might also make the mistake of bringing up the vampire squid that sucks away treasure and millions of dispossessed lives in the phony war on drugs, or argue for not inflating maniacs and small actors like Bin Laden into existential threats. Too much to hope for. I couldn't stomach it.
But as a business owner I'm always thinking of my own advantage. In a Fair Tax world, wouldn't it be easier to find a business to business source as much as possible to replace higher cost retail purchases for personal expenditures? There has to be an inflection point above which natural market forces become black market forces. It hasn't been tried in the United States, I guess, where the culture of corruption at the individual family level is actually remarkably small, though I wouldn't want to test it with direct incentives. If current fairtax.org proposal were to pass, I think a million wholesale - wink wink - vendors would spring up just for the purpose of tax evasion. Wouldn't that happen? It'd be so easy to make purchases and divert goods for black market sale with such a wide arbitrage of twenty to thirty percent. And businesses would be free to do this because supposedly there would be no requirement for auditable inventory accounting on the part of suppliers. Without schedule C or corporate income tax isn't that so? I think faced with initial failure, the system would be forced then into a value added tax, which would destroy small businesses. Value added taxes promote consolidation of market venues and suppliers. More onerous accounting and corporate consolidation seems to me to be the obvious end-game of the Linder proposals. They would not free small businesses from tax admin which is the best argument for them.
So I've been thinking about two things. First, the radical and irresponsible nature of the modern GOP, which, if anything, should permit the Democratic party to be radical itself. We look like dopes talking about eating peas and whatnot. The entire basis of discourse has shifted. We have to bail all the water while they get to talk about the storm being our fault because of idolatry or some other nutty stuff. If we do not begin generating real ideas for change ourselves, we will be the conservative party during a time of fundamental discontent and economic suffering. Preserving the best of old institutions is important, but those that rely on bipartisan consensus cannot be counted on with security anyway Despite the lack of basis for GOP arguments, defending the established institutional consensus is not politically viable in a time when primary social institutions are seen as corrupt and unjust.
Please Democratic party. Let us abolish the income tax with a progressive tax bill that could remove tax accounting from operational business accounting. Let us fund the federal government solely with corporate property tax, inheritance tax, capital gains and a flat tax on dividends, and leave residential and personal property value for state and local government to tax. No more IRS. I'd favor abolishing the income tax in that case. The economy has to pay the taxes one way or another. Why not have the tax where the accounting is natural to be done, within the financial system? Any tax on an individual is tyranny.