Eat Your Own Deduction
It’s very easy to rant about taxes or slobber over the notion of a warm and fuzzy IRS, but personally I think both sentiments lack direction. The fact is that we need to completely revamp the tax system so that we reward effort, and get the community’s share of the extravagance. And yes, just so it’s really clear, I do mean our share. We are one nation on one planet. We enjoy certain shared amenities -- military, transportation systems, communications infrastructure, education, etc. -- that aren’t easily billed directly to individual accounts, and that’s why we have taxes.
And yes, I support collecting the share needed to operate our governments through taxation of expenditures rather than of earnings, as we now have it. It’s lunacy to tax people for being productive. We should get our needs met out of the excess. By taxing spending, we would stimulate creativity and growth, and at the same time, encourage conservation, humility, and, frugality.
The tax issue is not just about numbers; it’s about quality of life and the soul of our society. We need to design and implement a system of collecting a fair share from everyone. A system of such integrity that people won’t object to contributing their share.
And by the way, until we get the system in balance -- which means paying off the national debt, now around $6-trillion -- we should recapture some of the loot that disappeared into the pockets of contractors who scammed the government into buying goods and services that were either not necessary or not delivered. There is a whole bunch of crooks out there with hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money which they essentially stole albeit by working the rules. These are the people who should have to restore our economy.
For too long, our tax system has overtly favored the few, the rich, the campaign contributors. It’s time to go through the tax code line by line and eliminate the gifts to the greedy. For instance, one of my favorites, the business meal deduction. Currently, you can write off half the cost. Which means that when wealthy executives take each other to dinner, they can write off hundreds or thousands of dollars, while the rest of us who actually work, only get to deduct $25 from a $50 dinner.
Instead of being able to write off a percentage, they should make it a hard figure. Like $25 a person. Hey, you can buy a guy a steak dinner with a bottle of decent beer for 25-bucks without being ashamed. And if you want to spend more, then it comes out of your pocket. Taxpayers don’t have to pay for every bite, after all.
Why shouldn’t it be fair?
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
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