Professor Bainbridge looks at the President's tax reform panel, and doesn't find exactly the radical change I was hoping for. I want to see the tax code radically simplified, and to see entitlements moved away from the public purse, and a gradual lessening of things controlled by Washington. I'd also like to see my own take-home pay increase. I don't know if the President is going to accomplish any of these things, especially now that Social Security is dead in the water.
If VAT replaces income tax for all but the wealthiest, that might be worth doing, but only if the Canadian method of public transparency is followed (Yes, I'm praising something Canadian). My father's been a big VAT fan for a while; he thinks it will shift the way people spend their money to better things. It might be so; it might not be; we'll need to see the proposal. I have a great fear that if tax reform is too modest, the Democrats will kill it, the way they killed the partial Social Security privatization, by the simple method of declaring an already-moderated legislation to be "too radical".
We aren't going to be able to negotiate our way to this stuff. FDR didn't "negotiate" the New Deal, he proposed, the Democratic Congress obeyed (most of the time), and the Republicans spent 20 years out of the White House. When is the GOP gonna start acting like the majority party?
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