In the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, Tom Hanks, who was playing Congressman Wilson, was asked, "Why is Congress saying one thing and doing nothing?" He replied, "Well, tradition mostly."
However, better is very relative. It is better to have a broken arm than to lose the arm. It is better for your child to get C’s on his report card than F’s. Better is not necessarily good. In this case, A Better Way is just more of the posturing that we have identified with Congress. Looking at it you might recall the words of Ronald Reagan when he said, "I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress."
Campaign Posturing and Tax Reform
No successful presidential campaign comes to mind where the candidate lays out a specific agenda. Campaigns speak in generalities like:
- Health care will be better
- People will have better paying jobs
- Immigration problems will be handled
- People will be protected from terrorism
- The tax system will be reformed
- Life will be better
Vice Presidential Nominee Pence and the FAIRtax
When Mike Pence was a Congressman from Indiana, he signed on as a cosponsor of the FAIRtax in 2006. While in Congress, Mike Pence was a tireless advocate of smaller government and objected to many of the spending packages sponsored by his own party.
Congressman Pence demonstrated that not only was he a cosponsor but that he understood how the FAIRtax would benefit America when he answered a question about the FAIRtax in a Town Hall forum in Anderson, Indiana in April of 2009. You can see what Congressman Pence said by clicking here.
2016 Republican Platform
FAIRtax supporters also can take a degree of satisfaction from the fact that the 2016 Republican Platform is reflecting more and more agreement with our principles. Here is an excerpt from the platform.
Our Tax Principles To ensure that past abuses will not be repeated, we assert these fundamental principles. We oppose retroactive taxation. We condemn attempts by activist judges at any level of government to seize the power of the purse from the people’s elected representatives by ordering higher taxes. We oppose tax policies that deliberately divide Americans or promote class warfare. Because of the vital role of religious organizations, charities, and fraternal benevolent societies in fostering generosity and patriotism, they should not be subject to taxation and donations to them should remain deductible. To guard against hypertaxation of the American people in any restructuring of the federal tax system, any value added tax or national sales tax must be tied to the simultaneous repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, which established the federal income tax.
Vice President Pence, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Huckabee Sanders
If Donald Trump is elected President and Mike Pence becomes Vice-President, one of the first domestic tasks the new team will confront is tax reform. Trump has made positive statements about the FAIRtax. His political team forced Trump to go safe with his campaign tax proposals. However, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his daughter, will have an opportunity to influence Trump when it comes time to look at tax reform.
We know that Pence understands the FAIRtax and that it is real reform. He knows that Congress will only “appear” to do reform—Republican or Democrat control notwithstanding.
Conclusion
If Trump and Pence are elected, you will have two people who appear to be interested in actually breaking the mold that has existed in Washington, D.C. and if they can convince Congress, we may see real tax reform.
If Hillary is elected, she will still be faced with a crumbling income tax/payroll tax system and will have to take steps to repair it. Most likely she will be drawn to Senator Cardin’s proposal which contains a sales tax, VAT and income tax.
When we try to make sense of the statements coming from politicians about how they are doing tax reform by just moving a few commas and making sure that lobbyists can reverse those changes in a few years, we are very confused. Maybe author P.J.O’Rourke had it right when he said, “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”
However, we have the opportunity to shine the light on all of these politicians and demand that they can’t fool us again.
