Please don’t fall for tax reform.
It’s a con, and a shell game. It’s a promise every presidential candidate makes, including Trump. But we ought to be suspicious of grandiose talk about Congress reforming anything. Tax reform proposals always evade and obscure the real issue, which is the total cost– financial, compliance, and human– taxes impose on society. The fundamental questions about war and entitlements and state power go unasked. We never consider whether Congress really needs to spend more than $4 trillion in 2018, or how it managed to double federal spending in only 15 years.
Since those questions are never seriously raised, every proposal necessarily pits various interest groups against each other in a deadly game to make sure the other guy pays. After all, that $4 trillion has to come from somewhere. Hence we read articles about “winners and losers” in the Wall Street Journal, hapless tax serfs in a zero-sum world.
Other articles, including this one from Esquire, demonstrate how unlikely any substantive tax changes really are. Any talk of eliminating the senseless estate tax, for example, gives rise to paroxysms of anger and talk of “plutocrats” (when did Esquire become a bizarre leftwing mouthpiece instead of a men’s style mag?):
The Senate’s tax plan emerged full-grown from the forehead of Mania on Tuesday. As is customary for some documents, it is vague in almost all its major details. But we do know that it eliminates the estate tax entirely — a plutocratic goodie that probably caused a postmortem emission from the grave of John D. Rockefeller that looked like the gusher from his first oil well — and it gives to the middle class with one hand while taking it away from the…