Tax Day 2019: Hype and Hyperbole

Tax Day 2019: Hype and Hyperbole

by Duane N. Burghard

©2019

Few things get Americans going like complaining about taxes (despite the empirical fact that we actually pay less in taxes than many other first world nations). Trashing the IRS as a group of jackbooted government thugs is as American as Apple Pie, and a long standing tradition on both sides of America’s political divide (although, let’s be fair, the far right does it more bombastically and more frequently). But as we pass through our annual "gnashing of the teeth" that is April 15th, is it really that bad?

ehhh.

Now, before the unpatriotic whack jobs have their moment (and I know they will), allow me to establish my personal bona fides in the area of "right to complain about taxes." I am a former small business owner. My wife and I owned a chain of technology (computer) retail stores in about 10 different states. In the early 2000s, we routinely paid at least $4K/year in tax preparation fees (no, that's not a misprint, and let me be clear about how very happy I was to write that check each year and let those accountants take on that unspeakable nightmare for us). I actually took a picture of our combined tax return about a decade ago because it was a stack of paper that was literally FIVE INCHES TALL. My point? I am very familiar with how convoluted and complicated our tax code has become (which is to say, of course, that I'm actually not, but that I literally had to pay an entire firm of professionals to know it for me). It is a bloated mess with a million rules and a billion exceptions, and it is in need of rather incessant reform and changes (which, just to be clear, is exactly what it's getting).

But with that said, I feel the strong need to note that our tax system is not the result of some evil, detached, technocratic, bureaucratic entity that delights in screwing with us. Our tax system evolved into its current state, and this is the bitter pill to swallow folks: it did so at our request.

That’s right, our tax system is in the messy condition that it’s in today because that’s what we wanted. No great, evil cabal of Congressmen is sitting in a dark room saying, "gee, what new and more frustrating things can we do to make our tax system more complicated and harder to follow than the last two seasons of Lost?" No, they were instead doing exactly what we, the voters, ASKED them to do. We started with a pretty simple tax system, but then some people said, "but if I have children I should pay less in taxes," and they voted for people who said they'd provide a deduction for that. And then others said, "but I own a home and pay money in interest, I shouldn't have to pay taxes on that," etc. etc. THAT is how we ended up here, and it’s why we’re always going to come back here, even if some of our more batshit crazy and less educated tax advocates manage to shove something regressive and stupid like a “flat tax” down our throats … eventually (and probably shockingly quickly in fact) the exceptions and deductions will creep right back in.

Another incredibly common complaint I hear (and one which was immortalized in a meme on social media this week ... and this meme was basically the impetus for this blog post ... and I know it hit folks on both sides of the aisle because it was reposted by friends of mine on both the far left and far right) is that the government somehow knows what we owe but won’t tell us. It further goes on to suggest that the government has intentionally left us helpless in the face of this daunting task, and that it is further, maniacally, eagerly hoping we will fail (make critical errors in tax preparation and submission) so that it may despotically crush us for those mistakes. No. First, the government does not know how much we owe. We're both guessing when we fill out our W-4s (which, if you haven’t heard, thanks to Trump, is a process that’s about to get massively more complicated ... yeah, that full on NIGHTMARE is coming, and you should Google it, because that movie starring us is going to make The Texas Chainsaw Massacre look like Dumbo). 

The point is that when we fill out our W-4s, and when we do our end of year taxes, we’re making our best and most accurate guess of what we owe vs. what we have paid using the rules as we (and/or our accountants) understand them. Our taxes are always a "best guess" reconciliation, and here’s something of a shock for some people: the vast bulk of the time, the government takes our word for it. That’s right, for the vast majority of people, a computer looks over your return, not a person. And that computer then crunches the numbers in your return through an algorithm, and if it "looks right," it moves on … and if it doesn't, then it may get flagged for a human to look at.

What makes me say this? Well, for one thing, math. Last year, over 140,900,000 tax returns were filed and sent to the IRS (source: IRS). Assuming you had employees working on these returns 24 hours/day, every day (365 days/year), the IRS would have to review about 4.5 tax returns every second in order to keep up (and that assumes uniform complexity of tax returns, which is obviously silly ... remember that mine used to be a 5 inch stack of paper, and while I was somewhat unique, I wasn't that unique ... and there are literally a couple of million Americans whose returns are massively more complex than mine used to be). The logistics make that level of examination simply impossible. The system has to assume that most people are acting in good faith and many simple errors are ignored or not caught. So to get back to the ridiculous fabrication in the recent meme, no, the government does not know what you owe (though they do have a rough idea, as do you).

The next ridiculous assertion in the meme is that, not only does the government know exactly what your taxes are, but that they’re going to send you to jail if you don’t come up with and pay that amount which they say you owe. No. First, the truth is that people rarely go to prison if they get their taxes wrong (and BTW, the government gets it wrong too, which they will and do admit), particularly if it’s clear that the error in question is unintentional. This fact should make sense to people because, generally, the government doesn't want you to go to prison if you owe them money ... they want you to work so you can pay it back. Now, if the government determines that someone has intentionally and willfully defrauded us out of some of the tax revenue necessary to build our roads, fund social programs and yes, fund our military, then yeah, those individuals are probably in some trouble. Additionally, people can make a serious mistake, even if it was completely innocent, and they're probably going to be liable to pay a (maybe significant) fine for that (which is yet another reason why so many of us pay professionals to do our taxes, so someone else is at least sharing in that potential liability). But again, the point is that the vast bulk of people who are going to jail for tax fraud ... well, they should be in jail for tax fraud (and certainly there are others, our current POTUS comes to mind, who probably should join them, but that's another story).

But this idea again that "government sucks" when government is merely a reflection of what the majority of voters have voted for (or failed to vote for because they didn't bother to vote) is, to me anyway, basically projecting. I know a significant number of people who work in our government. They're overwhelmingly just like you and me. They want to do a good job, and they're doing the best they can with what they have. The only thing "broken" about our system is our unwillingness to do the hard work necessary to properly maintenance it (democratic Republics are like any other machine, they need care and maintenance to keep working properly … and we haven’t exactly shown ourselves to be experts at this task).

The bottom line here is that the people who argue against paying taxes to support our government are people who have been sold on a bullshit idea that "government" is somehow a separate thing from them. WE are the government. I admit that this reality is a MUCH harder sell because it requires that people accept responsibility instead of placing blame, but it's the truth.

Changing or Abolishing The Electoral College is a VERY Hard Thing to do

by Duane N. Burghard

©2019

OK, so here's a topic that's both ripped from today's headlines AND perfect for this blog.

Yesterday the New York Times (among MANY other media organizations) reported that United States Senator (and one of the (at last count) 12 million Democratic Presidential hopefuls) Elizabeth Warren was at a town hall meeting at Jackson State University where she proposed eliminating the Electoral College. Specifically, she said:

“Every vote matters, and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting, and that means get rid of the Electoral College.”

The comment was one of her biggest "applause lines" of the night. I was disappointed. Why? Because while irrelevant grandstanding and/or the throwing of red meat to a disgruntled crowd of people who apparently don't adequately understand how our system works has absolutely been the calling card of Democrats on the far left side of the party, Senator Warren has only recently joined this group. She used to be better than this.

Let's face some cold, hard facts from the Radical Center.

FACT #1: The Electoral College is embodied in the Constitution of the United States (Article 2, Section 1 ... also in the 12th Amendment). To be hyper-accurate, the term "Electoral College" is not actually used, however, the electors who choose the President were, at the time, called a college (hence the term as we know it today).

FACT #2: Because the Electoral College is embodied in the Constitution, abolishing or amending it requires changing the Constitution.

FACT #3: Changing the Constitution is very, VERY difficult (also, that's on purpose and, in my opinion, a good thing).

How hard is it to amend the Constitution? Well, we're Radical Centrists who like science and math, so let's do the math! COUNTLESS Amendments to our Constitution have been proposed by American politicians over the course of American history (no one knows exactly how many, but it's a BIG number). Of those, just over 1,000 proposed Amendments to our Constitution have actually made it to the floor of the US House of Representatives for a vote. Of those, just 33 have made it through Congress and been sent out to the states for ratification. Of those, just 27 have been ratified (and over a third of those were basically all at once (the Bill Of Rights)).

In 232 years.

In case the math doesn't get you yet, here's some more.

In order to get a proposed Amendment through Congress, you need "super majorities" in both Houses of Congress (note: yes, I'm aware that an amendment can also come via a national Convention called by Congress or from the State Legislatures ... which has literally NEVER happened, so we're not even going to even address those as rational possibilities). That means you would need 292 US House Members and 67 US Senators to agree to abolish or amend the Electoral College ... oh, and they'd all have to agree on exactly what to replace it with! There is NO indication that this kind of bipartisan consensus exists. Further, there's NO evidence that the Democrats, who could (and frankly should) expand on their electoral gains in 2018 during the 2020 cycle, are going to have anywhere NEAR that level of support even after the 2020 elections.

Put as plainly as possible, even if the Democrats all magically agreed (and magic IS the only way that's going to happen) on what to do to amend or abolish the Electoral College, there's no remotely realistic projection that shows they will have 292 votes in the House or 67 in the Senate for that proposal.

It's not going to happen. At all.

As a result, discussing it in a nationally televised town hall forum is as I described above: irrelevant grandstanding about an issue that the candidate in question has absolutely no realistic expectation of EVER being able to deliver on. Making statements like Senator Warren's regarding issues like the Electoral College is problematic for a number of reasons, but chief among them is this: setting completely unrealistic expectations may be great for generating excitement and even votes in the short term, but it also creates a MUCH higher probability of longer term disappointment and disillusionment. We're dealing with a significantly under-educated electorate that doesn't seem to "get" how difficult such things are. Such people are then FAR more likely to end up disengaging and becoming cynical, declaring that "government just doesn't work" because the pollyanna promise they voted for doesn't magically happen. And that is EXACTLY how populists like Donald Trump gain support.

Now, just so I'm clear about my views on the issue of the Electoral College, I would completely agree that the Electoral College system is in need of reform (though I don't particularly support destroying it). The Electoral College was, like so many other parts of our Constitution, an imperfect, pragmatic compromise. It was added to the Constitution in order to make it easier for the legislatures in smaller states to ratify it. It is one of the MANY "least worst" solutions that are an integral and critical part of making diverse Republics such as ours function. In this particular case, the idea was to provide a buffer against the "tyranny of the majority" (i.e. direct democracy ... which, please remember we do NOT now live in, nor have we ever lived in, this is a Republic). The Electoral College solution promised to provide (and in fact did provide) a check to the electoral power of larger states (e.g. in colonial times, the people in Rhode Island were terrified that the will of Virginians would determine their lives). Finally, the Electoral College vote tended to provide a unifying and validating effect to most elections (since, in general, the Electoral College victories are greater in percentage than the popular vote ones ... do people remember that just an 11% shift in votes in 1984 from Reagan to Mondale would have meant that Mondale would have been President, or do they remember that Reagan won re-election in the greatest Electoral College blowout in American history?). And, for the most part, until about 20 years ago, it worked pretty well.

Let's think about that for a second before we just start trashing our institutions willy nilly (a tragically favorite pastime of both the far left and far right). A bunch of people in the late EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, when the nation consisted of just 13 states and about 3.9 million people (1790 census ... close enough) came up with an idea that overwhelmingly worked for OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS.

For the record, I think we should be pretty f-ing impressed by that.

But with that said, I DO also agree that it's not working now ... and FAR worse, it's obvious to me (and anyone else who studies the numbers at places like "538") that it's VERY likely to continue to not work (and get worse) in the foreseeable future. There are a series of reasons for this which can best be drilled down to unprecedented geopolitical homogenization and concentration (aka blue states getting bigger and bluer, red states getting smaller and redder). I also feel the need to note that these changes are NOT anything which could have been remotely foreseen by our nation's founders (again, 13 states, less than 4 million people ... compared to 50 states and nearly 400 million people and over 200 years passing ... it is irrational in the extreme to not expect that some things are going to go a bit wonky).

So I agree that it isn't working ... HOWEVER, I'm not going to stand on a street corner and scream to throw out the electoral college baby with its Constitutional bathwater. Look, the fact is that maintaining Democratic Republics is HARD work. It takes an engaged, active, informed (educated) electorate ... all of which are areas we're getting progressively WORSE at (and THAT, by the way, is a MUCH bigger problem than the Electoral College). Fixing the big and hard problems takes TIME and prolonged, concentrated, pragmatic, effort. Progress, in our society, almost always happens in baby steps (which is why the vast bulk of legislation passed by Congress each year is changes to previously passed imperfect laws (that are hopefully then made slightly less imperfect) as opposed to new legislation.

Bottom line: I think it's completely fine to begin discussing how to reform (or even replace) the Electoral College, but you'd better have a VERY specific idea of what to replace it with (and we haven't heard that yet), AND you need to be ready to pragmatically compromise and modify that idea over time in order to get to something that will pass and ratify. Finally, you need to be realistic with people about the size, scope and difficulty of the challenge ... because if you're not doing that, you're just another bullshit artist, and we've got PLENTY of those.

Welcome to The Radical Center

Welcome to Radical Center

by Duane N. Burghard

©2019

Welcome to my politics blog, dedicated to those people who like me, are HARD core political pragmatists. I have my political opinions, I may even feel that one thing or another is "right" or "wrong", but at the end of the day, above all else, I recognize that, regardless of what is right, the only way to get something DONE in a Republic as diverse as ours is to find a (usually very pragmatic) solution that generally involves a compromise that few people like but which can garner the support of

218 US Representatives
60 US Senators (for cloture)
1 US President

because, if you can't get that, pretty much everything you're talking about is academic. There are what I call "least worst" solutions, and they are inherently imperfect (which is why the vast bulk of what Congress passes each year are changes to existing legislation and not new legislation), but they are also critical path to any kind of functioning government (and one of the reasons we don't function very well right now is because we've allowed ourselves to become hyper-polarized, which makes centrist politicians less common and thus compromise less possible).

Here's another example of what I believe: what's the most important thing in any and every race for President? If you said something other than "getting to 270 Electoral Votes," then this is probably not your blog and, given that the Internet is a BIG place and panders to literally MILLIONS of viewpoints, you're probably going to be a lot happier moving on right now (thanks for stopping in, best of luck, bye bye).

My posts on this blog are often offshoots of conversations from social media, or articles I've read on the Internet.  As a result, there's going to be quite the mix of longer form, deeper thinking, and short burst opinion. Also, as a centrist who tends to prefer science, empirical fact, and an absence of bias, you will find that I tend to choose source material which reflects those tendencies (I am also frequently critical of "news" sources on both the far left and the far right ... so if you think that Fox News or The Young Turks are unbiased news sources, again, this is probably not your place).

With respect to topics, as an American, I do tend to spend a disproportionate percentage of my time focused on the political, social, and economic aspects of issues that are important to me in the USA ... however, I will stray into those same areas internationally from time to time as well (e.g. I am a strident opponent of "Brexit"), and I absolutely will point out where and when I think other nations are doing something better than we are.

I have 6 primary focal points of policy interest, which I identify as "The Six 'E's". They are:

Environment (I've been studying climate change since 1988, I'm also a River and Reef ecologist)
Energy (alt sources like wind and solar, but also increasing efficiency etc.)
Education (I am the husband and the son of former public school teachers)
Economics (I am generally a Keynesian, pragmatic capitalist who believes in regulation)
Equality (I don't care what you look like or who you sleep with)
Entertainment (music, movies, tv, science fiction, and union rugby)

A LOT (but not all) of what I write politically will be tied to at least one of these topics.

Now, a little bit about me (and I swear to God, this IS the short version of my résumé):
I'm a white male of predominantly German descent, currently 53. I was raised on Chicago's North Shore (graduated from New Trier High School) where I was surrounded by what were then called "Rockefeller Republicans" (centrists ... you may not have heard of them because they were all exterminated by the neo-cons who accompanied Reagan to power in the 1980s). I was a United States Navy Officer (NROTC scholarship) from 1987-91 (and, understandably, this is where many of my opinions about military policy come from). I spent the overwhelming majority of the following 23 years owning and operating a series of IT firms (about 17 of them), including one that, at its largest point, was reportedly the 12th largest independent Apple dealer in the USA (for more info on that topic, please see the several posts about my life in business, which can be found in the 2015 section of my "Between The Ears" Blog). In those years, I became a HUGE fan of database programming with a tool called FileMaker Pro (I've been writing software using that tool for over 25 years), and I further developed my lifelong obsession with the gathering, organizing, and analyzing of large piles of data (financial and business data in particular). Following that career, I moved into Financial Services (where I have been for just less than 4 years). I am currently a Financial Advisor for a large brokerage firm.

Oh, and by the way, while all of that was going on, I somehow managed to run for US Congress ... twice (Independent nomination in 1992, Democratic Party nominee in 2006 ... obviously won nomination in both years, but not elected in either).  I also spent 5 years as a Lay Minister (in the 1990s, in a Christian denomination, I am "non-associated" today), and 4 years as a presenter for The Climate Project (2007-10 ... I have been following UNEP and WMO data on climate change since the late 1980s and was first published on the topic in 1991). On several occasions in the last 25 years I have lobbied on Capitol Hill regarding veterans, religious, health care, and environmental issues.

And just to make me an even more eclectic and bizarre mix, I've also been a radio personality (3 different times), and I write science fiction novels (see Amazon).

I currently live in Tucson, Arizona with my wife (we are "empty nesters" and our 30th Wedding Anniversary is coming up in December of 2019).

Finally, regarding your opinions and comments to my posts: I may or may not reply, which should not be interpreted as my either agreeing or not agreeing with you. Similarly, it would be a mistake to assume that I like or don't like you because I don't reply to something you've written back to me ... my responses are based on what I see and what I have time for (bottom line: it's not you, it's me ... and if it is you, sometimes I'll say so, and sometimes I won't ... oh well).

So that's it ... here we go!