Tax Lawyer's Blog

I couldn’t have found a better example of tax the rich claptrap if I hired a team of right wing zealots to read The Daily Kos and the Huffington Post 24/7/12.

Carl Hiaason should stick to writing corny yarns about wacky Floridian murderers and stay away from the tax code before he pulls a muscle.

Listen to these examples of his tax policy brilliance:

On Reducing the Charitable Contribution Deduction

The way it stands now it is stacked in my favor. If Mom and I each donated $100 to the United Way, I’d get a better tax break for the contribution just because I’m in a higher bracket. The same is true for mortgage-interest deductions.

I’ve written about this one before here and here.

You get a better tax break, Carl, because you are required to pay tax at a higher rate in the first place.

The rich would gladly trade the greater value of their charitable contribution deductions for the lower, middle-class tax rate.

Left-wingers have intentionally abandoned their egalitarian principles in favor of a progressive tax system that imposes an unequal and greater tax burden on a special class of Americans and then, in the rare instance when the inequity of that progressive system redounds to the benefit of the rich, they disingenuously jump to their feet and cry “foul.”

I cry “hypocrisy.”

Let’s put this to rest once and for all: Because the rich man pays tax at a higher rate any deduction he is allowed to take will be more valuable to him than the same deduction would be to someone who pays tax at a lower rate.

It’s a no-brainer, Carl.

Finally, if the Democrats truly want everyone to get the same tax benefit from a charitable contribution deduction all they have to do is ditch the progressive tax system and substitute in its stead a flat tax system.

I won’t hold my breath.

On Accepting Government Waste

If Obama’s revisions should pass, it won’t mean that every tax dollar raised will be spent carefully and efficiently. Our government is too sprawling and clunky. Waste, ineptitude and corruption have been a plague since the founding of the republic.

Where was this cavalier acceptance of the clunkiness, sprawl and wastefulness of government when Bush was President after Katrina devastated New Orleans and when it was discovered that the pre-Iraq war intelligence was inaccurate?

Looks like all it takes for the left to abandon its policy of speaking truth to power is for one of its darlings to hold the reins of that power.

We shouldn’t accept government waste, corruption and ineptitude regardless of the political affiliation of the man occupying the Oval Office.

And we especially shouldn’t accept it when the government is asking us to give it more money that it will waste.

Taxpayers are the shareholders of federal government. When a CEOs run a public companies into the ground the way our elected officials and lifetime bureaucrats have the federal bureacracy, the anti-business left shouts at the top of its lungs, “off with their heads.”

But when the federal government perpetrates the same “waste, ineptitude and corruption,” people like Mr. Hiaason shrug and call the mismanagment an inevitable by-product of bureacracy.

And what’s worse, he wants to reward this wasteful, inept and corrupt government by giving it more of your tax dollars!

On the Simplicity of Formulating U.S. Tax Policy

Yet what good things the government can and must try to do require lots of money, and it has to come from somewhere. For those of us who are in better shape to take a hit than our parents or our kids, this is a no-brainer.

Some very bright people trained in law and finance have been trying to decipher the U.S. Income Tax Code for decades and have only experienced moderate success, yet here comes Mr. Hiaason, without any background or training in the tax law, claiming to have figured it all out.

Apparently if he believes in something it’s a “no-brainer,” which, of course, means that those who don’t agree with him ain’t got one.

For Hiaason, formulating sound tax policy is a piece of cake; a simple case of good versus evil, black versus white, you’re either with us or you’re against us.

Isn’t this the very kind of Manichean thinking that the left claimed they loathed in George Bush?

The good guys, of course, are those driving the Obama left-wing spending machine; the bad guys, the Republicans and the free market conservatives who have had the unmitigated temerity to believe that the private sector (read “the rich” by anti-business liberals) is better than the government at deciding how its money is spent.

Hiaason says he wants to pay more taxes, because it is necessary; because the government needs the money to help the less fortunate.

Well, if he truly feels this way, I wonder whether he has ever voluntarily paid more taxes to the IRS because he thought the government needed the money?

It is perfectly legal to do this.

Why would Mr. Hiaason wait for the government to force him to pay more taxes if he truly believed it was a “no brainer” that he should pay more taxes?

And if tax increases on the rich are truly the obvious solution to our economic woes, would Mr. Hiaason favor allowing wealthy taxpayers the choice to pay additional taxes to the government?

We can simply add a box to the federal tax return that if checked would require the taxpayer to pay in, say, an additional 10% in taxes to the U.S. government.

Since, as Mr. Hiaason says, this kind of patriotic largesse doesn’t require a brain, rich people will in overwhelming numbers check the box and make the additional tax payment.

Of course, the reason a voluntary self-assessment policy won’t be enacted is because imposing a special surtax on the rich is anything but the no-brainer Hiaason contends it is.

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