If you’re one of the roughly 51% of Americans who pay taxes, February, March, and half of April are ugly months. Should you be brave, you’ll do your taxes entirely by yourself. Alternatively, you’ll pay vast sums of money to an accountant or more reasonable sums of money to a less personalized online service such as Turbo-Tax. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recognizes that tax season is burdensome, financially and emotionally, but, typically for Warren, her plan is to make things worse: She wants the government to handle your taxes. Fox, meet henhouse!
Warren’s tweet—and remember, this comes from a sitting politician in the federal government—openly attacks a private company:
Yes, according to Warren, your problems during tax season are because private companies want to make it hard for you to file your taxes. Moreover, the only thing that can rescue you from this burden is the IRS itself. Here’s a different way to think about it:
First, the process of assembling information, filling out forms, and getting taxes filed was horrific long before TurboTax came along. In other words, TurboTax and corporations like it are a response to an existing problem rather than the problem’s creators.
Second, the real creator is the Byzantine legislative and regulatory tax system that has arisen in America since 1913, when Congress ratified the 16th Amendment.
According to the Tax Foundation, as of 2015, tax legislation was over 2.4 million words, while tax regulations were up to 7.6 million words. Moreover, that word count didn’t include the endless case law interpreting all those words.
It’s a reasonable guess to say that the situation has gotten worse in the ensuing nine years, not better. No layperson can be expected to master this information, so it’s completely logical to pay for accountants or computer programs that will take on the responsibility of helping out.
Third, handing to the government the power to calculate and file your taxes for you is to reward it for creating a system that exceeds any ordinary person’s ability to figure out how to pay his share of funding our bloated government. The government is responsible for this horror, and now it promises to make it all better for us? I don’t think so.
Fourth, Warren is correct that there’s a problem. However, typically for a leftist, her solution is bass ackwards. She’s kind of like Bernie Sanders. Well, she’s exactly like Bernie Sanders.
Bernie was correct that large corporations have way too much power in America. Of course, he ignored the fact that a significant part of their power is because they’ve allied themselves with the American government, effectively creating a fascist system: The government allows private enterprise provided that enterprise ultimately carries out the government’s wishes.
As a curative, rather than severing the bonds between the government and corporations and harking back to old anti-trust laws that would break the stranglehold that companies such as Google and Facebook have over America, Bernie went the communist route: End private ownership entirely and hand everything to the entity that has the guns.
Warren effectively wants to do the same thing with taxes: End any pretense that we have a say in the matter and let our friendly leftist government simply take our money, a little now and, probably, all later. After all, it has the guns.
The simplest tax system and the one that America should have is a sales tax. That’s it. A 10% or 15% sales tax. Everybody would pay taxes, which is how it should be, and the rich would pay significantly more because they buy significantly more. And that would be it. No tax dodges, no complicated calculations, no nothing.
But of course, that will never happen. That’s because Warren is correct that corporations have a vested interest in our current complicated tax system. However, what she’s hiding from you is that our government has an even greater vested interest in the control the current system gives it, as it rewards political allies, punishes political foes, and manipulates taxes to push its social and economic policies.
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