tax discredit

by Anthony Marenna

Published: February 14, 2008

It’s official! When you get your income tax rebate check, it will contain $600 more than usual, plus $300 per dependent child. Great, right? Well, kind of.

To some extent, I find the need to defend this move when detractors trivialize the importance of a mere $600. Truth be told, that check will go a long way towards food, housing and warmth for those low/fixed-income people who are struggling in these uncertain economic times. And there are many.

My main concern is that this is just a $168 billion bandage that will only cover our considerable economic wounds long enough for our congressmen to waste more time trying to figure out whether or not Roger Clemens took steroids a decade ago. Eventually the bandage will fall off, and the remedy that could have healed the wound will never have been developed. Though President Bush called the package a “booster shot,” it has all the markings of a placebo.

The worst part about this entire mess is that the public is missing out on the veiled admission that this stimulus package represents. By putting tax dollars back into the wallets of millions of Americans, the current group of (overall) statist legislators has essentially admitted that it takes a free economy to heal economic issues and to properly stimulate an economy during times of economic uncertainty. Laissez-faire; it’s not a new concept.

This all comes back to the basic economic truth that when people can take home their entire paycheck, spending it on what they need to survive comfortably, the economy will regulate itself. Money will naturally flow through the American infrastructure. We get in a real mess when we start trying to manage the money system. Taking a part of a person’s income makes a living wage unlivable. Introducing play money into the economy by artificially lowering interest rates lowers the value of the American dollar that the already over-taxed man is depending on for survival. He can’t win in this scenario.

At the end of the day, our elected officials simply must acknowledge that the current legislative trend is leading us away from economic freedom - and then reverse that trend definitively.

This stimulus package cannot, therefore, be the solution. Alone it produces only a false sense of financial hope for many struggling Americans. That will not do. What will it take to transform the thinking behind the stimulus into lasting economic stability? Certainly not this “comprehensive tax reform” garbage that our politicians have been bantering about as of late. It will take throwing our entire taxation system away, starting from scratch. Essential to this taxation Renaissance is non-automatic taxation (the government cannot penalize the people for making money). Essential to the taxation Renaissance is simplicity (a short code written in the vernacular that doesn’t require an accountant and hours of filing). And essential to the taxation Renaissance is immediate immunity to those non-entitlement people who are below the poverty line.

An economy is only as good as the weakest economic links. And a highly regulated taxation/economic system that is most detrimental to the weakest leads the entire economy into chaos. Unlike the television show, the government can’t simply hire Linda Blair to bid our “weakest links” goodbye.

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