Tax policy should be simplified. We need tax reform and lower taxes.
President Trump is becoming a politician faster than we thought he would. He’s caving here and there to try and get things done, and we do appreciate that. But government must make deals to get things done.
Let’s simplify the tax reform bill and show the American people some details about the plan. Let’s not just talk in generalities. The American people are a lot smarter than government gives them credit for. Let’s discuss the tax reform plan, and release the numbers showing the tax brackets and what the net effect of the reform will be.
Currently, people in the 39 percent tax bracket don’t pay 39 percent; they probably pay 30 percent. Well, in the new plan, taxpayers in the 35 percent tax bracket are going to pay 35 percent. (Actually, they’re going to probably pay more without the deductions.)
Let’s get the facts out there. Republicans are the worst when it comes to facts. We’ve got to stop talking and do something. Let’s show the American people and see what they think should be done. Politicians are afraid to say that we might lose $1 trillion over the next couple of years while this new tax policy kicks in and we increase the revenues and the gross national product. The American people are prepared to accept that we might lose $1 trillion and will have so much more respect for government if it admits up front that a new tax plan might cost the economy $1 trillion before things turn around and we start being able to pay down the $21 trillion or $22 trillion debt that will have accrued. We’ll start paying it back, and this will also take away the Democratic Party’s power to suggest that Republicans are hiding something.
When we cut taxes, we’ll have less revenue, but we just need to show the three tax brackets. (If Trump wants to, he can count zero as a bracket, although we have no idea why.) Just make it simple, make it easy – although the government is already talking about the plan as if it were already going to be unnecessarily complicated. This is because the Trump administration is trying to be all things to all people.
Still, we think a tax plan would pass Congress as long as it’s kept simple. The administration should include some Democrats in the process – and it’s vital to demonstrate that 20 percent of the people in this country pay 80 percent of the taxes and to show that if this 20 percent made more money, they might pay 90 percent of the taxes. That is the sales pitch we need. Let’s not be concerned about the “rich getting richer,” because the rich have to get richer in order for the middle income earners to make more money.
This affects people’s lives, and the administration must explain it that way and sell the plan to the American people, because if you take the top 20,000 wage earners in this country out of the mix of income, then there is no disparity. It’s not that much at all. And let’s not look at just the dollar amounts; let’s consider what people have today versus what they had 20 years ago. Middle income earners have twice as much stuff: the houses are bigger; they have more cars; they have more televisions. That’s what we should be considering rather than just the actual wages themselves, which, like many other economic indicators, can often be misleading.
FEDERAL SPENDING
As we move on from the basics of a simplified tax plan, it’s time to talk about cutting federal spending in different areas. We know Trump once put a freeze on hiring, but we don’t know what happened to that plan. (Maybe one of our readers or contributors can write to us and explain what happened.) We’re not suggesting that government should curtail services, just that we have too many people doing too little work. We could cut government spending by merging some departments. Let’s do some things so that the American people can see where government is actually going to cut spending without reducing the availability of services.
This idea goes back to our idea of less talk, more action. There are many areas in which too many people are doing too few things. We can get a whole lot more done with less money – not to mention that we’ve got to stop the corruption and waste in government. Imagine how much spending we could eliminate by ridding government of corruption and waste in all departments, including instances in which one person could be given more responsibility, rather than several employees with limited responsibility.
President Trump said he was going to make our government more efficient, but we’ve yet to any evidence that this is happening. Perhaps “the swamp” is bigger than he’s able to deal with all at once. We get that, but we still think he needs to try something new. The government needs to pay money to save money. For example, let’s say somebody saves the country $1 billion. Would it be worth it to pay that employee $50,000 to save $1 billion? There’s not a business in the world that wouldn’t do that – and that’s what the government needs to do. The unions are going to fight it, because it will eliminate some union jobs, but they have to allow the government to fire bad actors who are creating the corruption and contributing to the ineffectiveness of our government.
Most people don’t like change, but if you don’t have change, you’re never going to be effective in lowering the cost of government. If we can lower the cost of government 10 percent and increase the revenue to the federal government by 5 percent, that might help eliminate the national debt in less than 10 years.
