Git er Done

What a relief! You finally got your taxes done. Of course April 15th fell on a Sunday this year, and that threw things off a bit. Monday, April 16th happened to be Emancipation Day, celebrated only in Washington, D.C., in recognition of President Abraham Lincoln’s freeing the slaves in our nation’s capital, nine months before he actually signed the Emancipation Proclamation. So tax filing day moved back two days to Tuesday, April 17th.

So unless you’re one of a relatively small number of Americans who got an extension to file their taxes later, or unless you’re one of a quite large number of Americans who paid no federal income taxes at all (almost one half of us!) you’re relieved that it’s over – at least for 2011.

So this is probably a good time to consider what changes could be made to make a very flawed tax code and tax collection system a little less insane. Here are some possibilities.

Move tax day from April 15th to November, in close proximity to Election Day. This would result in taxes being in the forefront of peoples’ minds when they go into the voting booth.

Lower the rate of taxes on people who actually pay them, but broaden the base. It’s not healthy for the nation to have nearly half the population with no skin in the game.

Eliminate the withholding of taxes. The argument is, people are less conscious of how big a bite taxes actually take from a person’s income when it is deducted from their paycheck (sort of like the frog in the pot with the water getting warmer and warmer and the poor frog not noticing until he’s cooked.) If we actually had to write a check every quarter to the IRS, the two-by-four upside the head would get our attention on how much the government is actually taking from us.

Or my favorite, let’s go to a flat tax, or better yet let’s dump the tax code and get rid of the IRS altogether, and move to a national sales tax. I’ve been a co-sponsor of legislation that would sunset the tax code a couple of years down the road. This would require Congress to think seriously about whether we should keep the existing tax code, or make dramatic changes (the flat tax or sales tax for example.)

Of course our current President has made some suggestions about changing taxes as well. He and his allies’ latest effort is the so-called Buffet Tax. Interestingly Charles Krauthammer (one of my favorite political commentators) decided to run the numbers and see what effect the Buffet Tax would have. Krauthammer found that

“If we collect the Buffet Tax for the next 250 years – a span longer than the life of this republic – it would not cover the Obama deficit for 2011 alone. As an approach to our mountain of debt, the Buffet Rule is a farce.”

The reality is, none of these tax changes, for good or bad, are likely to happen before the American people decide this November, in which direction they want to take our country. I’m hoping and praying that they’ll say, it’s time for action. We’re not under-taxed, government over-spends. Simplify the tax code, or get rid of it altogether. Stop taking so much of our hard-earned money. We’ve had enough. Now go to Washington and git er done!

p.s. On an unrelated item, the space shuttle Discovery was flown by a 747 over Washington yesterday to its final resting place at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum Annex at Dulles Airport. We snapped some pictures and I thought I’d share them with you.
Shuttle over Rayburn HOB

Shuttle Close up with Capitol & Flag

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