MadDAsHell
MadDAsHell's JournalThe U.S. Tax Code: Should it be structured to raise revenue, drive "desired" behaviors, or both?
I've been chewing on this question this morning after Senator Warren's announcement that she was working to make it easier for us to file our taxes.
While I do appreciate those efforts, I responded to a related thread stating that this taxpayer would so much rather have a simplified tax CODE than a simplified tax FILING system. And I'm not necessarily talking about a flat tax or any other regressive crap the neocons can come up with to help corporations avoid paying their fair share, but simply shifting our approach to tax collection in this country.
I'm not an accountant or a tax policy historian, but it seems like over 200 years our tax code has went from one with a primary goal of RAISING REVENUE for government expenditures, to one with a primary goal of INFLUENCING BEHAVIORS that the government sees as desirable. This is scary for 2 reasons:
1) Who gets to decide what those "desired" behaviors are? This can be heavily influenced by which party is in power. While deductions/credits/etc. may seem innocent, is it a good thing that a home-buying decision is heavily influenced by the mortgage interest tax deduction, a deduction that while nice, fails to mitigate the enormous risk the buyer has just assumed by purchasing a home? Is it a good thing that giant corporations get tax breaks alleged to help them "create jobs," when we know full well that that isn't happening in a lot of cases even when the breaks are applied?
2) This system, focused on driving behaviors instead of raising revenue, time and time again fails to raise sufficient revenues to cover expenditures, because when deciding how much can be spent, instead of simply estimating the # of taxpayers and income levels in a given tax year, it's grasping in the dark at estimates on how many people will take a certain deduction, and how much that deduction will net each person, etc.
What are your thoughts? Do you like the current tax approach?
Clinton supporters: 2016 aside, are you comfortable with DWS's stated purpose for superdelegates?
With a primary candidate being 15% to the nomination before a single one of you has voted?
And with this system, alarmingly undemocratic in the eyes of many, being a feature of the "Democratic" nominating process?
I acknowledge it's probably hard to separate the merits of the system with the immediate and substantial advantage it gave your preferred candidate from the day she declared, but if you can, I'm sincerely curious how the average Clinton supporter views this system.
Good for the Party, or an embarrassment to the Party?
That "Excuse Me"= Bernie is Sexist gets any play...is the reason why "loony left" also gets play...
I've posted before about how we're eating our Party from the inside out with our political correctness obsession (or at least our use of PC as a political tool) and I'll say it again:
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR OWN PARTY WITH THIS SHIT.
Can we PLEASE, for the love of God, agree as a Party to go back 50-60 years and start using accusations of discrimination for their intended purpose: to call out and influence the demise of actual discrimination?
The longer and more we use them as political silencing tools, the less meaningful they become (and the less aware future generations will be of what sexism and racism actually are).
I believe in my heart that the vast majority (not all, mind you) of the individuals accusing THE MOST LIBERAL SENATOR and his supporters of racism and sexism know in their hearts that what they're saying is untrue, but they can't resist the political points these accusations score. There is nothing democratic or progressive about those kinds of political games.
Has Melissa Harris-Perry, with one email, talked her way out of a tv journalism career?
I mean once you've outright admitted that you "played the race card" (I hate that phrase but she's basically admitting in her own words that that's what she did), will any network executive be willing to touch her with a 10-foot pole?
HR lesson one for journalists: If you're going to use racially charged buzzwords like "token" and "mammy" to allude to the idea that your network is racially discriminating against you, maybe wait a few days before backpedaling and saying the core issues have nothing to do with race or racial discrimination. When you backpedal 24 hours later, you look at best, like someone who has no filter or ability to control their emotions for the good of their own career, or at worst, a race-baiter.
What network in their right mind would hire someone who just openly admitted that she dropped allusions to racial discrimination into a conversation just for kicks?
She's normally one of the best and brightest minds on television, but she may have just committed career suicide, not just with MSNBC but with any network with an audience of notable size.
When the #1 most liberal Senator and his supporters are the "racist" wing of our party we've lost it
If the goal for our party is to have zero credibility with independents, and to generally look like we have no idea how to actually vet and evaluate a candidate and his/her positions, we are beyond exceeding.
We are (no joke) calling the nation's most liberal senator a racist. If we're saying it simply to elevate an opposing candidate, we're liars. If we truly believe he's racist, we're nuts.
After this new low, how do we expect as a party to ever be taken seriously again?
Everyone's for political correctness/policing speech until these tactics are used to silence THEM.
Policing speech has all kinds of political advantages:
1) You can take something completely out of context and use it to label your opponent as sexist, racist, whatever label is mostly political effective
2) You can then use those labels as your excuse to not engage in debate/discussion, especially if you're fairly uncertain of the validity/strength of your own argument. e.g. "I'd be more than happy to discuss your concerns about Hillary's donors but Bernie and his supporters are racist, you're a Bernie supporter, and I don't have time to engage with racists.""
It's been all fun and games using these tactics over the last few decades against opponents on the right but it's shitty as hell that we're now having to deal with them internally. Who in their right mind, 1 year ago today, would have guessed that Bernie Sanders and his supporters would be considered the "racist" wing of the Democratic party?
Not to mention that whole separate discussion that we as a party are ACTIVELY eliminating the true horror of such words by using them as political tools. With how much we've abused these words over the years, does the average young person today even know what racism looks like? What sexism looks like? What bigotry looks like?
The question is, will we learn anything from this? Or will we be right back to this the next primary season?
Why the extreme vitriol over a completely thankless job that 99% of us would avoid like the plague?
These folks are asked to interpret the original intent of a 230-year old document...would you want that job?
There's no doubt that some of Scalia's votes tilted Supreme Court decisions in directions we didn't want it to go, but are you surprised? The whole point of having an odd # of Supreme Court Justices is that we know trying to find unanimity on the interpretation of a 230-year old document, whose authors have been dead nearly 200 years in some cases, is nearly impossible. So we force a decision one way or another by (for the most part) not allowing ties.
Some of the responses on DU and elsewhere seem to assume that:
1) we should all 100% agree on the interpretation of this document, and
2) we should be shocked that some justices would come to different conclusions than us personally, and
3) those justices must be idiots, or more likely "evil" for doing so.
None of us would want this job; IMHO both liberals and conservatives ought to have a little more tact when a SC justice dies, regardless of where they tended to ideologically land on their decisions.
On edit, I clearly underestimated how many people would want this job. Personally, I value my personal life, the safety of my family, and my privacy way too much to take a job like this.
And that's not even taking into consideration what we learn each time a SC justice dies: that there are literally millions of people hoping that person is burning in hell. I'm not willing to live a life like that regardless of salary, but clearly not an issue for many DUers?
The accusations of racism against Sanders and his supporters is never going away. We created this.
When a few decades ago we decided that calling someone a racist, sexist, bigot, etc. was useful as a political tool to silence our opponents, whether it was the truth or not, we created this.
This circus world where those words have become absolutely meaningless, is of our own making. Today's young people don't even know what racism or sexism is, because in their lifetime they've heard that EVERYTHING is racist, sexist, etc.
The chickens are home to roost; unfortunately I saw this coming years ago and we have no one to blame but ourselves that our party eats our own.
Let's just hope it doesn't cost us 2016.
Congressional productivity - Would you be in favor of a single term limit for all congresspeople?
I realize the 2 year House terms would probably need to be adjusted upwards given the learning/ramp-up period for a new congresspeople, so I'm thinking something like 3 year terms for representatives, 6 years for senators.
After one term (as either), they are ineligible to serve in either chamber again. 75% of the country is over 18, I don't think we'd have a shortage of people eligible to serve just because we eliminated the permanent political elite.
Their egotistical need for re-election (and the changes to their behaviors/voting patterns that come from that need) disappears. Sure they'll still lie/promise anything to get elected (not sure how we would ever fix that), but once in, you can pretty much trust that they're going to vote their conscience because future votes/campaign dollars are no longer at play. Promises of future cushy jobs, etc. would still be an issue but that's another topic.
Yes, we would lose some good long-term legislators. But I think what we gain by being able to in a very short time move on unproductive/obstructionist legislators would fair outweigh the few quality legislators that we would be losing with such a setup.
The one negative I see (have heard this before, can't claim I had this insight) is that the non-politicians (advisors, consultants, etc.) would be more powerful than ever, as those would be the only people with long-term experience on how the system works.
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