Minor Thoughts from me to you

There's a very simple way to demonstrate that high taxes are a bad idea. Rich people have lots of money. The best thing possible for everyone else is that rich people spend that money. Every dollar spent by a rich person is a dollar that helps employ someone else. If buying a car, auto works are employed; if buying a suit, textile workers are employed; if buying a house, construction workers are employed; if buying a yacht, dock workers are employed.

The more government taxes someone, the less likely they are to put their money in places where it can be taxed. If they stop spending, the entire economy suffers. If government lowers their taxes, they will be more likely to spend their money, thus creating jobs for everyone else.

Call it trickle down economics. Call it Reaganomics. Or call it psychology. Whatever you call it, it works. Tax someone more, they'll spend less; tax someone less, they'll spend more. I'm better off when they spend more. Aren't you?

Republicans in the Assembly and the Senate failed to pass the Taxpayer Protection Amendment. Owen looks at what went wrong.

The bottom line is, the Republican leadership in Madison failed to step up, fight hard, and actually promote conservatism. If we want to pass this thing, we'll have to keep fighting at the grassroots. The only way our "representatives" will pass this is if we force them to.

The biggest problem with our current tax code is that it's too complex. Millions of hours worth of effort are wasted every year calculating who owes what, to whom, for what, in what quantities. Every year Congress makes the entire enterprise more complicated. For instance, after Hurricane Katrina, Congress wrote all kinds of breaks into the tax code for those who had been harmed by the hurricane or those who were helping those harmed by the hurricane. The result is a mess of new forms, qualifications, deductions, credits, required documentation, and -- most of all -- confusion.

It turns out that there's actually a very good reason for all of this confusion:

Three of the four top lawmakers on the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees, which are in charge of writing tax laws, pay professionals to file their annual tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service.

(The fourth files his own taxes every year.) Will any of the other law makers ever consider filing their own taxes?

"Absolutely not," said Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.). "I'm not an accountant. I'm a lawyer."

Well, buddy, I think you should feel the pain that American taxpayers feel. I propose -- beginning next year -- that all Congresspeople and Senators be required to fill out their tax returns by hand. No calculators. No computers. No tax advisors. No visits to H&R; Block. Furthermore, any errors will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And why not -- they're writing laws that all Americans are expected to follow fully. It's only fair that they themselves face the same expectations and the same penalties for failure.

As for not allowing the lawmakers to have any help when filing their taxes, just consider it an incentive to simplify the tax code. After all, not everyone can afford fancy software of expensive advisors. If the people that write the code (who are supposedly experts on the topic) can't follow the code, maybe the code needs to be changed. Left to its own devices, I don't expect Congress to ever simplify the tax code. But maybe if we make them feel the full and undiluted pain of the tax code, they'll see the light.

While I was growing up, my dad frequently mentioned a set of tapes he had once heard. The speaker on the tapes proclaimed that no American truly owed income taxes. He proclaimed that the entire tax code was a fraud foisted upon the American public and that you were free to earn income without paying taxes. The idea sounded kooky, but my dad (and I) was intrigued and, as I get older, asked me to help him investigate the idea.

Well, Papa, I've got your answers in. Reason magazine published a May 2004 article: "It's So Simple, It's Ridiculous": Taxing times for 16th Amendment rebels.

The partisans of the tax honesty movement go beyond complaining that the income tax is too high, or that out-of-control IRS agents enforce it in thuggish ways. They claim, for a dizzyingly complicated variety of reasons, that there is no legal obligation to pay it. The continued life -- and even flourishing -- of that notion, in the face of obloquy, fines, and jail sentences, says something fascinating about a peculiarly American spirit of defiance. It may even say something encouraging about what it means to live in a nation of laws, not of men.

Never has any court anywhere -- much less the IRS -- accepted as valid any of the many arguments the movement offers for how and why there is no legal obligation for individuals to pay federal income tax. In fact, courts will fine you up to $25,000 for even raising them, insisting such arguments have been rejected so often by so many courts at so many levels that they are patently frivolous and time-wasting.