Examining The Issues

James Willis at the Conservative Underground is producing a series of short articles on the big issues the candidates and the media will be lying about discussing for the next 2 years which bear looking at. So far he has 4 out covering abortion, taxes, amnesty, and gun rights.

These are good articles with firmly stated opinion and no equivocation and so far he's batting .500 with me. On the abortion issue he's pretty much an absolutist where I'm not. It's his tax position where we part company.

I'm right with him in opposing the "progressive" tax system we have now which blatantly punishes success and rewards sloth. When the system can be modified and gamed with little effort to benefit some group favored by the government for whatever reason, you can bet that this feature will be abused to the maximum extent possible. The IRS scandal currently being swept under the rug my the media is a great example but is far from the only abuse being foisted upon us.

If you work for the federal government in D.C., paying taxes is looking to be distinctly optional, and if you get a big government grant to do something favored by the government, and don't forget to include a generous donation to the party in power, you can declare bankruptcy after awarding top management bonuses and golden parachutes that would embarrass Don Trump.

Mr. Willis suggests that the imposition of a "FairTax" would allow the effective abolition of the IRS with all its attendant abuses and make everyone much happier. I doubt that. Whenever you hear the word "fair" from a politician, you should place one hand over your wallet and the other on the butt of your gun because this is not far removed from an armed robbery. If you want an example, just look to Europe where it's called a VAT (Value Added Tax). When something is produced, at each step the value added to the product is taxed at rates varying from 10 to 25%. Except of course if the product is not sold to an end user. Then it's passed on down. The VAT rate varies depending on how the government values the votes of the end users with food being taxed more lightly than say autos.

This adjustability give both elected officials and revenue agents something to do that justifies both the reelection of the pols, and the steady expansion of the bureaucracy.

Even though there is no system of taxation that can't be gamed to the benefit of the political class and their enablers, I personally prefer the flat tax method which has been adopted by several Eastern European countries and has been working out to their benefit noticeably better than the VAT systems in use in Western Europe.