Tag Archives: America

A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer and More Efficient Tax System by T. R. Reid

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The journalist T. R. Reid argues that America’s national tax system is a disaster, but we could fix it if we started over and adopted the best ideas about taxation from other countries. According to Reid, better systems of taxation are based on the BBLR model, i.e. they tax as much as possible (a “Broad Base”) but at rates that are as low as possible (“Low Rates”). So, instead of allowing lots of deductions and exemptions and credits, as we do now, we should simply tax all income. But since more income would be subject to taxation, the government could lower tax rates for everyone. Because their rates would be lower, fewer people and businesses would hire lawyers and accountants in order to avoid taxes. Business decisions and personal decisions would no longer be made on the basis of what taxes would be owed. In addition, filing a tax return would be much simpler than it is today.

Reid cites New Zealand as the country with the best tax system in the world. They once had a complicated tax system like ours, but were able to revamp the whole thing, following the BBLR model. He also argues for the adoption of a VAT (Value Added Tax), a kind of sales tax that every advanced country but the United States currently applies (one benefit of a VAT is that it’s hard to evade).

Some of the ideas Reid proposes would be acceptable, in theory, to both liberals and conservatives. But he admits that overcoming opposition from special interests and taxpayers who benefit from the system’s complexity would be a big challenge. For example, he recommends eliminating the deductions for charitable donations, local taxes and mortgage interest. I assume he would eliminate medical deductions as well. No doubt some taxpayers would end up paying more, while some would pay less. But we would have a system of taxation that was simpler, fairer and more efficient.

Given the benefits, it seems like the United States should do something like this. Given the craziness of the Republican Party, it seems unlikely that we ever will.

This, That and the Other Thing

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There are few places as forlorn as a resort town on a chilly, cloudy, damp, out of season weekday afternoon. Thus, Virginia Beach, Virginia, last week:

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But let’s move on.

Paul Waldman writes about “The GOP’s Baffling Decision to Raise Taxes on Millions of Americans” at The Week.

If there’s one thing we thought we could count on in this crazy world, it’s that Republicans will never, ever, ever support a tax increase. It wasn’t always this way — Ronald Reagan, who to hear some people tell it practically walked the Earth without sin, actually raised taxes multiple times — but today there may be no more foundational belief to the GOP than the principle that taxes must come down, everywhere and always.

Nevertheless, “the GOP is right now rallying around a bill that will raise taxes on tens of millions of Americans.” It certainly is strange. One part of the explanation, however, is that Republicans aren’t very good at this governing thing. Another part is that they’re so eager to cut taxes for rich people and corporations, they’re willing to antagonize millions of voters and lie about what they’re doing.

As a partial antidote to the above, consider reading all about “The Relentless Honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein”. Ian Ground presents an excellent overview of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, both early and late, at The Times Literary Supplement.

That Was the Year That Was

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The title of Michelle Goldberg’s overview of the past year in The New York Times is “The Anniversary of the Apocalypse”. I thought “apocalypse” was too much, but Merriam-Webster says it means “a great disaster”. That’s fair. In what follows, I’ve removed all descriptions of particular offenses:

In the terror-struck and vertiginous days after [the] election a year ago, as I tried to make sense of America’s new reality, I called people who lived, or had lived, under authoritarianism to ask what to expect. I wasn’t looking for concrete predictions — one of the disorienting things about that moment was that no one, no matter how learned, had any idea what was happening — but for insights into how the texture of life changes when an autocratic demagogue is in charge.

A secular Turkish journalist told me, her voice sad and weary, that while people might at first pour into the streets to oppose [him], eventually the protests would probably die out as a sense of stunned emergency gave way to the slog of sustained opposition. The Russian dissident writer Masha Gessen warned that there’s no way, with a leader who lays siege to the fabric of reality, to fully hold on to a sense of what’s normal. “You drift, and you get warped,” she told me.

They were both right. The country has changed in the past year, and many of us have grown numb after unrelenting shocks. What now passes for ordinary would have once been inconceivable….

… this nightmare year has upended assumptions about the durability of the rules, formal and informal, governing our politics. There’s a metaphysical whiplash in how quickly alarm turns into acceptance and then into forgetfulness….

Hannah Arendt once wrote of the role vulgarity played in undermining liberalism in pre-totalitarian societies: “The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability”…. In this administration, crassness has become a weapon, annihilating social codes that once restrained political behavior, signaling that old standards no longer apply.

Lately, the pace of shocks has picked up, even if our capacity to process them has not….In another administration this [take your pick] would have been a major scandal. In this one it barely registers.

How can America ever return from this level of systematic derangement and corruption? I wish there was someone I could ask, but we know more about how countries slide into autocracy than how they might climb out of it. It’s been a year, and sometimes I’m still poleaxed by grief at the destruction of our civic inheritance.

In moments of optimism I think that this is just a hideous interregnum….

Hey, all we have to do is win more elections, like we did tonight in Virginia and New Jersey. Or we could get the opposition to develop a sense of shame. One of those should be manageable.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

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The title pretty much sums up the book. In five chapters, the author discusses five dangerous illusions that beset the United States. They’re the illusions of:

  • Literacy — crap like professional wrestling and reality TV and the distractions of celebrity culture in general)
  • Love — the popularity of pornography, especially the kind that demeans women
  • Wisdom — how colleges have been turned into glorified vocational schools
  • Happiness — the “positive psychology” movement that offers false promises and promotes conformity
  • America — how the “greatest democracy” on Earth is actually a militaristic empire in the service of corporate capitalism.

He often exaggerates how bad things are, but the book serves as a good corrective to the idea that this is a healthy nation. Some of the negativity derives from the fact that Empire of Illusion was published in 2009 during the financial turmoil of the Great Recession. For example, Hedges casts doubt on the idea that the Obama administration would make any improvement to our health care system, such as making sure that more of us have adequate health insurance.

Even if he overstates some of the problems, he criticisms all have a basis in reality. A brief sample:

 

Individualism is touted as the core value of American culture, and yet most of us meekly submit, as we are supposed to, to the tyranny of the corporate state…. There is a vast and growing disconnect between what we say we believe and what  we do. We are blinded, enchanted and finally enslaved by illusion…..[p. 182].

 

 

The more we sever ourselves from a literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas, for one informed by comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans, celebrities, and a lust for violence, the more we are destined to implode. As the collapse continues and our suffering mounts, we yearn, like World Wrestling Entertainment fans, or those who confuse pornography with love, for the comfort, beauty and reassurance of illusion….And the lonely Cassandras who speak the truth about our misguided imperial wars, the economic meltdown, or the immindent danger of multiple pollution and soaring overpopulation, are drowned out by arenas of excited fans….[pp. 189-190].

 

I expect Mr. Hedges would offer our demagogic president’s scary political rallies as further confirmation of his thesis.