The Vacuum Cleaners -- a Lesson on Taxes
Worcester, Mass., April 15: A short comment on vacuum cleaners and taxes from Libertarian Presidential candidate George Phillies:
"I still have the brush-type vacuum cleaner my mother gave me 40 years ago. It's had several replacement parts, but it runs well. I also have an all-vacuum hose cleaner, not to mention my little floor brushing robot. They run in very different ways, but they have one thing in common: They're all vacuum cleaners. They all transfer dust from the floor to a holder.
"Your federal taxes are a lot like my vacuum cleaners. They run on very different principles, but they all do the same thing: They transfer money from your wallet to the Treasury. The fine details may differ, but in the end every tax leaves you with less money in your wallet.
"We've all heard vacuum spin artists who want to sell you new and different vacuum cleaners. Their spiritual relatives, the tax spin artists, want to sell you new and different taxes. None of the tax spinners talk about the worst tax of all. That's the grandchild tax, under which we spend the money, and our grandchildren get to pay our bills.
"It's always easier to make new taxes sound simpler than old taxes. After all, lobbyists and irate taxpayers concentrate their interests on adjusting real taxes, not on inserting special rules into taxes that don't exist. But once a real tax has been legislated, you can be certain that lobbyists will be hard at work persuading Congress to adjust the rules to benefit beekeepers or computer programmers or accountants--and I'm only listing professions of a few friends.
"The spin artists won't tell you one thing: Change for the sake of change hurts large numbers of fellow Americans. If we eliminate capital loss deductions, Americans who liquidated stock holdings-- holdings they might otherwise have kept without our tax laws -- will be forced to eat their losses. If we change the income tax into a value added tax, every American who put after-tax money into a Roth IRA will now have their money taxed again, to their great personal loss.
"The tax reform that will actually help most Americans is the reform in how taxes are spent. When Uncle Sam spends less money, and therefore stops borrowing money to bloat the national debt, every American will benefit.
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