BLOGS FROM US^®

(First published as To Flatten or Not to Flatten: Is that Really the Question? on Blogcritics.) On Monday, the Bloomberg editorial staff came down on the side of making the tax code more “progressive”.  The piece was in response to flat income tax proposals from three or four of the current Republican presidential primary candidates. One can only hope that what passes for thinking in that article is not repeated in future Bloomberg work because it’s very deficient indeed. You’d need a map and a compass to journey deeper into mindlessness, but then, being mindless already, you couldn’t read either one.

Still, the flat tax flap does give pause for thought. Is flattening federal income taxes really what the Republican candidates want? Or are they using the idea as a gimmick? As a recent Blogcritics offering laments, intellectual thought rarely makes an appearance at a political debate.

Assessing the current GOP flat tax proposals with this precaution in mind, are they just shallow attempts to grab the ever-fickle media spotlight? Or, like a lightening rod, are they purposefully erected to draw attention to the real problem? Or is it a combination of the two – a spotlight-grabbing gesture that accidentally shines light on a serious issue? Door Number Two would be nice. Really. And we really think the answer lies there.

The Bloomberg article is a string of knee-jerk claims that ignores the essence of the flat income tax argument. For example, a true flat tax is based on gross income rather than adjusted gross, resulting in a net revenue gain. It also simplifies the federal tax code. Today, that legislation, together with the IRS’s interpretive rulings and regulations, is almost 73,000 pages. It’s a conglomeration of complexity and convolution that almost no one, including your friendly taxman and White House officials, understands.

But, Bloomberg editors are happy with it and they should be happy for a long time to come. The flat tax idea has been around for decades and has gained absolutely no Congressional traction. While it has a popular fairness appeal, it cannot withstand the phalanx of special interests arrayed against it. The tax code is not an unintelligible mishmash by happenstance.

So, why are the Republican candidates talking about it again? The facile answer is the coveted media attention lavished on Herman Cain for his 9–9–9 plan, which includes, among other things, a flat tax. In what appears to be predictable monkey-see-monkey-do chain reactions, several of the other Republican candidates formulated flat tax proposals, too. But, is that really all they’re about? Inhabitants of a Pavlovian kennel, classically conditioned to crave the spotlight?

More likely, they are simply cowards. Pushing an idea with some popular appeal, these people are actually advancing a fairness argument they fear to make directly. And here it is. The problem with the federal revenue system is that too few people pay into it.  Put another way, too many people take too much out of it.

As we know, nearly half of all federal tax filers either pay no income tax or pay a negative tax. That number is increasing and not merely at the lower income levels. The fastest growing group of income tax non-payers includes those earning between $75,000 – $100,000 annually. These people cannot even pretend to be among the financially downtrodden yet they’re getting a free income tax ride. Meanwhile, the government’s generosity to them has a multiplying effect on the deepening federal debt burying our economy and us with it. It’s pure insanity.

We teach our kids to avoid child predators, those depraved individuals who would do them harm. Children are told to reject the lures of candy and puppies and other cute stuff and simply run away screaming for help. As adults, we have to do the same thing. When Uncle Sam tries to snuggle up using fistfuls of fiscal candy, we need to run away screaming, too. The scary arithmetic lurking behind those promises will do us all in.

See you in the mirror.

(Article first published as Obama Roasted by Nuclear Option Fallout? on Blogcritics.) With his poll numbers falling at least as fast as our economic outlook, a desperate Barack Obama exercised the nuclear option in his re-election bid. On September 19, Dan Pfeiffer, the President’s communications director, told the New York Times that the period of political compromise is “behind us”. This week, nine months into the current Congress and fourteen before the election, Obama went on a scorched earth campaign swing using the same spiel. In choosing to wage war on everything to his right, including, expressly, the middle ground, he has rained hellfire down on political negotiation. Has he roasted himself in the process?

Obama has never been much for bipartisanship anyway. From his first days in office, when he rebuffed Republican overtures with his “I won” retort, he has shown neither the aptitude, nor inclination, for it. With the new Republican House, Obama’s notion of negotiation is a lot more like dictation. He only tried to work out a deal with Republicans on one occasion and that failed when he kept moving the goal posts. Most often, his approach has been as it was with his jobs plan. Unveiling proposals to everyone at the same time while unilaterally anointing them beforehand as bipartisan. That is, and will always be, an amateurish non-starter.

By the middle of September, Obama’s re-election chances were dimming, even without a consensus Republican opponent. His base, consisting of leftist groups, was increasingly disenchanted. Independents, whom he has pursued ardently for the past year, remained aloof. Even California voters, for the first time since Obama’s inauguration, disapproved of his performance. Special elections in New York and Nevada went to GOP candidates because voters spurned Obama’s policies.

Things got so bad for the President that Clinton Strategist, James Carville, urged him to fire his staff and learn how to actually compromise. Instead, Obama’s response is to become more combative, more divisive and more extreme. Dismissing voter rejection, the President believes that isolating himself on the political left and excoriating all who disagree is a winning strategy. If he’s correct, it will be the first time in American history that an incompetent wins re-election by a take-no-prisoners appeal to extremism.

Fortunately, Obama’s strategy isn’t working. Oh, he’s made those in his base less jittery with assurances that his next term will be more to their liking. But, the left can’t get him elected. He needs the Independent vote, which he carried in 2008. To attract them, Obama has engaged in emotional, and distorted, rhetoric aimed at making the Republicans look so bad that he looks good by comparison.

Among his weapon of words is legislation that has no chance of passing. Obama plans to introduce several bills of that kind just to paint Republicans as wrong for the country. Basically, our President will throw childish temper tantrums in an effort to make himself look better than the adults in the room. “Hope and Change” has become “The Best of the Worst”. Not even Democrats are getting in line behind that.

While rhetoric and Bush got Obama elected in 2008, he’ll need more than verbiage and the Tea Party to do it again. He’ll need Republicans to nominate the wrong candidate, a polarizing right-winger, like Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann, who makes thinking people cringe. A majority of American voters generally reject extremist candidates on both ends of the political spectrum. While fanatics do occasionally win elections, it’s because they are smart enough not to campaign as one. And neither Perry nor Bachmann is that smart.

Obama’s campaign swing this week was full of bombastic self-praise for his successful first term and exhortations for four more years of the same. If an economy and job market made perilously worse are accomplishments, if dead end government programs and spiraling debt are resume headliners, what’s failure? We’ll never know because we’ll be moving to Australia.

See you on the left-side.