Sunday, May 2, 2004
John Fox has published 10 Questions The Candidates Don’t Want You To Ask.
Here is an exceprt from the preface:
There are two days this year when millions of adults like you play pivotal roles as Americans. The first is April 15, when you pay your taxes. The second is November 2, when you vote for the people you want to spend them.
If you’re like most of us, you’ll pick your candidates mainly by how much you like and trust them—their smiles, their voices, your sense of their integrity and capacity to lead. But policy issues also affect your choice. You’ll want to know where they stand on Iraq, terrorism, unemployment, Social Security, federal deficits. And on lots of social issues—involving housing, health care, education, marriage, and much more.
All of which means that you’d better remember April 15 when November 2 comes around. Why? Because our tax laws cut across all of American life. Except for the U.S. Constitution, they represent the most comprehensive expression of our government’s official values. What these laws tax or exempt, reward or ignore, crucially shape who we are as a nation and what we will become.
The people we elect every other November write these laws, and rewrite them, in every session of Congress. If we can get candidates to address welldesigned questions on the subject, we can learn more than their position on taxes. Their answers will expose their broader values.
Few candidates will welcome this challenge. Incumbents are not going to want to explain their failure to tackle the shortcomings of our tax laws or, perhaps worse, admit that they had no idea that particular laws were so inequitable. And challengers are going to be wary of offending some of their supporters by proposing sensible policies that help people who really need it and require others to pay more.
No, the candidates don’t want to hear these questions. That’s all the more reason to ask them.
Here are the first 2 questions:
Question 1: The McMansion Tax Break. Taxpayers can deduct interest on loans of up to $1 million used to buy one or two personal residences. Ask the Candidate: Would you limit the home mortgage interest deduction so that it subsidizes the purchase of one basic home, and would you redirect some of the tax savings to help qualified renters purchase a basic home?
Question 2: The Inequitable Home Equity Break. Congress offers certain homeowners a preferential deduction for consumer loans. Ask the Candidate: Would you eliminate the deduction for interest on up to $100,000 of consumer loans (called “home equity loans”) that benefits only homeowners who itemize?
7 responses to “10 Tax Questions Bush & Kerry Don’t Want You To Ask”
My what a Progressive list! Not one mention of AMT, inheritance taxes, capital gains. Reads more like a Democrat Party “talking points” memo than a sincere discussion.
Let me start a Top 10 Questions Liberals Don’t Want You to Ask About Taxes.
Question 1: Do liberals understand that “FICA” stands for Federal Insurance Contributions Act and that FICA taxes paid are contributions to an insurance fund?
So when the question is asked about eliminating the income cap will liberals also raise the benefits cap?
Bob Schulz has 537 tax questions the candidates don’t want you to ask.
Larken Rose has 6 tax questions the candidates don’t want you to ask.
That’s a lot of questions the candidates don’t want you to ask.
Candidates want you to ask tax questions to which their boilerplate stump rhetoric is a plausible response. Thus, the “McMansion deduction” question holds few terrors for either Bush or Kerry. Bush can respond to it by observing that it’s good to let people keep more of their own money; Kerry can change the subject to the “real problems” with the tax code, the ones relating to the tax cuts already enacted since 2001.
It’s answering questions like this directly that candidates don’t want to do, and there is no obvious way to make them.
Whoop-de-do. The solution would be quite simple: Tie the mortage loan interest deduction cap to the median price of a home in that area. $1 million ain’t a whole lot in San Francisco, San Mateo, Marin, Los Angeles, Ventura, and Orange counties. But obviously, $1 million is quite a bit in rural Utah or Wyoming.
All those questions are asking for targeted tax exemptions. English translation: They want your taxes to be more complicated to calculate. They’re not just confiscating our money, they want to confiscate the only thing we actually own-our lives.
The only solution to that problem is to ask the candates to mandate that every member of Congress has to calculate their own taxes. No accountants, no computer programs. They can call the IRS with questions, but if they get a wrong answer, they are still responsible for interest and penalties.
There are so many ‘inequities’ in the tax code that listing some number of questions is simply a waste of time. The basic question is: simplicity or equity?–one can’t have both. I would rather see a sales/consumption tax (not a VAT) at one rate that had very few exceptions. No income tax, even on trusts, corporations, and other non-individual, juridical entities. That would put a deal of us out of a job, but it would protect (and respect) individual privacy.
It won’t happen because the tax code is another vehicle for exercising power, by Congress and others, and they won’t give it up. So go right ahead and tinker away with phasing out deductions for “the rich” and putting multiple conditions on exceptions to exceptions. I’ll keep my job, but I won’t feel as if I’m doing anything other than playing a game. The tax profs can wax moral about the “code”, but one might as well admit that their “help” is on the level of arranging those famous deck chairs . . .