Flat Like a Marble
Just 4 months ago, Utah got a flat tax.
Now, people are getting frisky to layer onto that infant “flat” tax things like “charitable contributions, mortgage interest, medical expenses, etc.”
The argument is that those items will bring 80% of filers into the “flat” tax system. Maybe they will, but let’s please stop calling it a “flat” tax. We’re simply (after just 4 months) moving toward a rehash of our old system but with a sexier rate up front and uglier deductions on back.
States are laboratories for democracy. In the broader national debate, score this one Neal Boortz – one, Steve Forbes – zero. Boortz argues that the flat tax concept won’t work, because politicians can’t resist layering exemptions and deductions onto any tax that is temporarily flattened.
Now, people are getting frisky to layer onto that infant “flat” tax things like “charitable contributions, mortgage interest, medical expenses, etc.”
The argument is that those items will bring 80% of filers into the “flat” tax system. Maybe they will, but let’s please stop calling it a “flat” tax. We’re simply (after just 4 months) moving toward a rehash of our old system but with a sexier rate up front and uglier deductions on back.
States are laboratories for democracy. In the broader national debate, score this one Neal Boortz – one, Steve Forbes – zero. Boortz argues that the flat tax concept won’t work, because politicians can’t resist layering exemptions and deductions onto any tax that is temporarily flattened.
posted by steve u. at 1/31/2007
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1 Comments:
I will have to agree with Boortz's Law of Taxation Politics. The urge to engineer society via tax rule layering is simply too strong for most politicians to resist.
This is why the Fair Tax would suffer problems as well. Pretty soon you end up with diffrent tax rates on everything. And that obfuscation makes it soooooo easy to sneak in a rate increase in this sector or that.... You get the picture.
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