Video shows what is wrong with our tax system

A big hat tip to Sen. Thomas Massie for finding and tweeting this, in response to those who assure us the IRS won’t use the 87,000 new agents and auditors the Democrats just hired to go after lower and middle-income Americans, the way they already do with 87,000 fewer agents and auditors.

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1560663299578298368

It’s an IRS recruiting video where the example of what the job entails is not “making billionaires pay their ‘fair share,’” it’s “taking down a landscape business owner who failed to properly report how he paid for his vehicles.”  Three points, aside from the obvious one of how they’re targeting a landscape business owner, not the CEO of Facebook:

1. If he “failed to properly report it,” maybe that’s not because he’s a criminal genius but because our massive tax code is so impenetrable that nobody understands the proper way to report anything.

2. Why should it be any of the government’s business how a landscape owner pays for his vehicles? That’s using the tax code to enforce particular behavior, which is antithetical to a free society. Tax codes should be for raising revenue – period – but ours is a giant labyrinth of rules designed to reward some behaviors by letting you keep some of your money and discourage others by taking more of your money. Democrats claim the government shouldn’t be dictating morality, but they use the tax code to dictate every aspect of our lives and make us conform to how they think we should be living.

3. If IRS agents are public servants who are paid with taxpayer money, then why is their attitude toward a small business owner who might have understandably made a mistake on his ridiculously complicated taxes to treat him like a hostile combatant and “take him down” instead of explaining the correct procedure and letting him file an amended form?

This one short clip gives away so much that’s wrong about our entire tax system, which has been so completely corrupted by lobbyists and their pet Congress members that nobody can understand it. It’s being used more as a carrot and stick to enforce government-approved behavior than as a way to raise money needed for essential services.

All of this brings me to a point I’ve been making for well over a decade, one that was part of my platform when I first ran for President in 2008. If you want to end the tyrannical rule of Washington and its enforcers in the IRS, scrap our gargantuan tax code that punishes productivity and sucks out huge amounts of time and money from the economy like a giant leech, and pay for government while letting the payors (us) otherwise just live our lives the way we see fit, then the future Republican Congress needs to scrap the entire system and replace it with the Fair Tax. It’s a consumption-based tax system that replaces all that nightmarish paperwork with a form the size of a postcard.

https://fairtax.org/

By the way, one other benefit: if we had the Fair Tax, we wouldn’t be hiring 87,000 more IRS agents. We’d be laying off the ones we have now.

Related News

Here’s a perfect example of how the tax code is used to try to enforce “preferred” behaviors and how it seldom works. That same “Inflation Reduction Bill” (the media now calls it “the Climate Bill,” because everyone knows it does nothing to reduce inflation – it also will do nothing to change the climate, but a lot of people haven’t figured that out yet) includes a $7500 tax credit for people who buy certain electric cars. In other words, poor and lower middle class taxpayers will subsidize auto purchases for people who can afford a $50,000-and-up EV.

Well, Ford and GM are now denying that their decision to raise EV prices by $6,000-$8,500 had anything to do with that bill. They insist they were planning to do it before the bill passed. But the bill's $7500 EV tax credit is actually an extension of one that’s been around for years.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/gm-ford-say-electric-vehicle-price-increases-have-nothing-to-do-with-dem-spending-bill/ar-AA10JOKD

Whether they’re directly related or not, there’s no question that when government subsidizes anything, the price rises to accommodate the extra money available thanks to the government. For instance, the government keeps spending more and more to support “higher education” (the quotation marks are sarcastic.) Yet the cost of attending college rises at four times the rate of inflation, and is 500% higher than in 1985. Just as work expands to fill the allotted time, college tuition expands to absorb all the increased government funding, leaving liberals forever crying that we need to spend more.

But then, Democrats have to keep spending more of our money on college because they want everyone to go to college because that’s how young people get indoctrinated and miseducated enough to vote Democrat and keep this vicious cycle going until eventually, one semester at Yale will cost more than the space program.  

Ominous trends 

President Biden has been taking bows for strong jobs numbers, even though I’ve pointed out some serious concerns, like a drop in the labor participation rate with many of those new jobs being taken as second or third jobs by people who can no longer survive on just one salary due to inflation.

Now, there are some ominous trends brewing on the job front. A survey of over 700 executives in a wide range of industries by the consultant PwC found that over half are planning hiring freezes or layoffs in the next year. In fact, it’s already happening:

“The survey showed that 50 percent are reducing overall headcount, 52 percent have implemented hiring freezes, 46 percent are reducing or eliminating signing bonuses, and 44 percent have rescinded job offers.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/report-disturbing-shift-hiring-patterns-points-looming-recession-biden-economy/

There are a lot more details and findings at the link, and much of it suggests a recession is coming or is already here, despite denials from the White House. It’s possible that the only person whose job will be absolutely secure through 2024 is the Biden staffer in charge of redefining words like “recession.”