The swamp never changes …

Real Federal tax reform should be a relatively simple thing. 

Eliminate all the subsidies, special tax treatments, tax offsets, tax credits, loopholes and the like, and start over. Get back to basics: tax income however it’s received and from wherever it’s derived. Keep graduated tax brackets if that makes you happy. 

But stop the rest of the nonsense. 

I know that’s hopelessly naïve on my part.  I can always hope. 

Of course, that’s not going to happen. Too many people, too many companies, too many state legislatures, and too many special interests are in the way. Everybody wants to keep what they have now, or even expand what they’re already getting.

That parliament of whores we call Congress are all salivating at the renewed opportunity to kiss the butts of their campaign donors and constituents by bending, twisting, and perverting arcane sections of the tax code to keep them happy.

There’s absolutely no reason – economic or otherwise – that our tax code is so complex.  Our tax code should only be focused on getting revenue to support Federal government operations.  Everything else in the code is crap put there by special interests. 

It’s a tax code; it’s not supposed to be a cornucopia of handouts for corporate welfare or social engineering. As such, it should be designed solely to raise money, not give it away. 

People who expect the Federal tax code be “fair” are fooling themselves. The courts ruled long ago that nothing about taxes needs to be fair or equitable. 

Moreover, those who usually argue vehemently for “fairness” aren’t really interested in that; if they were they’d be in favor of a flat tax where everybody – the poor, the middle class, and the rich – would all pay the same rate on their income. And it would cover all income. 

Don’t hear self-anointed champions of the poor hollering for that, do you?  Nope.  What they want is to dramatically raise the income threshold for who qualifies to be “poor” so more get more tax payer dollars and benefits without paying anything in. And Congress goes along. 

Doubt that? Consider this: Congress under both parties routinely passes laws to give tax rebates and other payouts to people who don’t pay any Federal income tax at all.    

Think about that logic for a moment.

People get tax rebates on taxes they didn’t pay.  Our government also sends checks to non-taxpayers who claim multiple dependents they don’t have, people who have jobs but fall below a certain income level, and others, including people here illegally. 

And now that same Congress is debating whether to raise those payouts even more.  Just to get the votes Republicans need to pass this “tax reform.”

Our media have generally focused on only a few issues in this legislative effort.

First, the rich might pay a bit less in taxes. Corporations would see their tax rates go down. In about 10 years the middle class might have to pay a bit more in taxes.  The poor won’t benefit. And the now heavily subsidized premiums for ObamaCare will go up, affecting millions. 

Got to be honest here: I’m okay with all that. Especially if loopholes are closed.   

The rich pay almost all the Federal income tax already; close all the loopholes and they’ll probably pay more. The lowering of the tax rate on corporations is meaningless – hardly any big corporations pay much if any tax at present because of all the credits, subsidies and loopholes.

The middle class should pay a bit more in taxes when all their specious tax breaks and credits go away; those have never accomplished anything that wouldn’t have happened anyway without them. Most of these are designed more to tilt the marketplace for special interests, like realtors, childcare providers, and solar energy panel installers, for example, by subsidizing their cost. Strip away the tax breaks and  credits and the free market will drive prices down for the middle class.

What about the poor?  Honestly, why should people who don't pay any tax now get an additional tax break? On what? 

Here's a better idea.  How about we stop subsidizing and incentivizing poverty?  If we really want to help the poor then don’t reward able-bodied people for pushing themselves into poverty. Don’t reward getting pregnant at 15, dropping out of school, becoming a drug addict, or committing a felony. That way people can qualify for a real job, make real money, work hard and do better. Tax policy has nothing to do with poverty, defeating it or increasing it. 

Finally, ObamaCare premiums were already skyrocketing long before there was talk of eliminating the personal mandate and payoffs to the insurance companies. The people who couldn’t afford health insurance before didn’t gain practical, useful health insurance under ObamaCare.  If they were only paying a few bucks per month for ObamaCare. but couldn’t afford the deductibles in the thousands, did they ever have real coverage?    

One thing I particularly like about the tax reform package in its present form is that it rights a grievous wrong that's been perpetuated for decades. It could eliminate some of the Federal tax offsets given to residents of high-tax states.   

Right now that’s a $100-billion a year tax break people in high-tax states enjoy, at the expense of the residents of other states. Politicians in those states rightfully worry their current residents, especially the rich, will flee to lower-tax states once they can’t offset their state and local taxes against their Federal tax anymore. That’s a possibility. 

However, what really keeps these state and local politicians awake at night is that they finally may have to rein in their spending on increasing the size and cost of government.  They’ll lose the freedom to raise state, local, and property taxes whenever they want on whomever they wish, knowing the offset minimizes the bite. The speaker of the New Jersey Assembly already said they might need to reconsider the recent “millionaire tax” they passed if they lose the offset.  Boo-hoo. 

Then there’s the supposed closing of other loopholes that continue to favor the rich and corporations.  There are so many of these hardly anyone can keep track of them.

Except lobbyists. Make no mistake, when tax policy is being written, the lobbyists come out in droves, like ants at a picnic. They all want their piece of the goodies.    

That’s when you can see the real swamp in action. 

And that’s when you can clearly see how our elected representatives are willing to sell us out at the bidding of powerful special interests.

How they are willing to trade their vote – or hold up the passage of a bill – for some bit of pork that benefits a single company or handful of companies in their state or district. How they preach about simplifying the tax code at the same time they weave in more complexity, written so specifically that it can only apply to a favored few.  

How achieving the promise of substantive tax reform always fails these days because practically everyone in Congress is beholden to someone or some group opposed to anything that might strip away some of their special deals and require them to pay more taxes.  

Last but certainly not least, how petty they are, using their vote to settle old political scores. Think Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, and John McCain.   

Or as a bargaining chip to get something else that has absolutely nothing to do with the tax-reform legislation at hand. Think Susan Collins.   

Then you have the grandstanders now opposed to anything that might increase the deficit, unless it’s something they want which would also increase the deficit.  Or the clowns on the left like Schumer who never met deficit spending he didn’t like until now; now he’s a budget hawk. 

Does everybody in Congress think we’re idiots? They must. 

After all, we keep voting them in. What does that say about us?    

The swamp never changes. It will never change on its own. The tax-reform package just floats the crap to the top again so it’s more visible. 

There’s only one way to change it. Vote them all out.  Every last one of them. 

Then maybe we’ll get term limits.  Ethics Committees with teeth. And a reduction in the pay-to-play mentality of incumbents from both parties that thrive in the swamp.   

Explaining this country …

It’s usually when you’re travelling. Someone from Canada or from Europe will ask you how we could have elected Trump instead of Hillary, why everybody here can have a gun, and why we don’t have free nationalized healthcare as they do, for example.   

What they really want to know is why we aren’t more like them.    

I seriously doubt citizens of other nations get questioned as much so frequently. I’ve never asked someone from Canada or Europe why they aren’t more like us.

The less-than-subtle implication of their questions is that their country and its people are somehow morally and socially superior to us. And that we really aren’t as smart or enlightened as they are, or we would be more like them. 

It’s easy to chalk some of that up to ethnocentrism. But clearly they don’t understand us. Nor should we expect them to.  

Our own media consistently distort reality here to feed a specific narrative. Foreign media then pick that up and never bother to do their own homework. It’s dishonest, disingenuous, and lazy, but it is what it is. That’s why the world has trouble understanding us.    

If your entire opinion of America is shaped by what’s presented by CNN or MSNBC or the Washington Post or New York Times, or the AP wire services, you’ll never understand us.

There are millions of other Americans that don’t live or work in New York, on the West Coast, or in the D.C. metro. And those millions don’t necessarily share the same values or political views of those places. Or support the same agenda. Those millions are not ignorant hayseeds, they’re not religious bigots, they’re not homophobes, they’re not racists, either. 

Despite how our media and the entertainment industry here typically portray them.    

They’re just ordinary folks. Their concerns are pretty down-to-earth: protecting their families, keeping food on the table, earning a decent living, safety and security. They have about as much in common with the talking heads in the media and Hollywood stars as a fish does with a horse.

These folks weren’t stunned Trump won over Hillary – they voted for him. They weren’t alone. However, they were conveniently overlooked by our media leading up to the election. Their opinions simply didn’t matter as much to big-city journalists, news anchors, and pollsters.

Or the Democrat Party or Republican Establishment, for that matter.   

That’s why so many in the media – and the major political parties – were shocked that Donald Trump won the Republican primaries. When he won the election, the media and their Liberal and Democrat pals were caught completely by surprise; everybody they knew, everybody whose opinion mattered to them, voted for Hillary.

Based on how our media had constantly dismissed Trump as a blow-hard buffoon with absolutely no chance to win, imagine how the world felt. How did this happen?   

The answer is in a map showing which individual voting precincts went for Hillary and which for Trump. There’s a sea of red – for Trump – and scattered little pockets of blue for Hillary. 

That map makes it startlingly clear how ridiculous it is to judge all Americans’ opinions only by what’s important to a relatively tiny part of America – that tiny part obsessively covered by our media as the supposed bellwether of American public opinion.      

Listening only to our media, you’d never suspect that the number one concern of Americans is the economy and jobs – and has has been for years – not protecting illegal immigrants, transgender rights, or alleged Russian meddling in our elections or possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.

As widely reported, it's true that healthcare is a top concern for most Americans, too.

But Americans’ concerns are focused primarily on skyrocketing rates and deductibles under ObamaCare, and little on whether women should get free contraceptives. 

Here’s what our media rarely if ever report: most working Americans still get their health insurance through their employers. Less than 3% - 5% of American citizens lack any health insurance, and even they can’t be turned away from hospital emergency rooms because they lack coverage or the ability to pay. Everybody here gets healthcare already. Citizen or not. 

It’s the law.    

Contrary to media reports, there’s no great groundswell of support for nationalized single-payer healthcare either, especially if means higher taxes for everyone and limits on the doctors you can see and longer wait times to see them. That may work for people in Canada and other countries, but it simply won’t fly here; Americans aren’t willing to make those tradeoffs.   

But you wouldn’t know that if all you see are interviews with people and groups focused on promoting liberal and progressive agendas and single-payer healthcare for all. And that’s pretty much all the world sees in our media. 

It’s too much to ask that Canadians and Europeans look beyond that and discover what really is important to most Americans. Honestly, I don’t blame them for their ignorance of us. Much of the time we are woefully ignorant of them, too. 

One thing that would be especially useful for people from other countries to know is how our distrust of too much power in too few hands is such a big part of our cultural DNA.

We always want to prevent the consolidation of power by a privileged few and instinctively distrust anyone or any entity that makes an attempt to gather and wield too much power. We are leery of banks and businesses that get too big, politicians and special-interest groups that get too powerful, and faceless bureaucrats accountable only to each other.

It’s why we don’t think highly of the United Nations or other world bodies making decisions for and about us. We would never tolerate having our lives and our economy managed by something like the European Commission, either. 

Our instinctive resistance to centralized authority and world opinion may be the most puzzling part of our culture and politics to citizens of other countries. They welcome the “one world” concept of some commission or another dealing with global issues. We are the outlier.

Foreigners also routinely underestimate how much Americans in general hate what they see as bullshit. More to the point, especially when we suspect someone is feeding us bullshit, whether that’s from diplomats, our politicians, our media, or even a salesperson.  We have an extraordinarily low tolerance for “political speak” or political correctness.  It’s all bullshit to us.   

Want to know a big reason Trump was elected? Part of it was our aversion to bullshit.  He spoke plainly like a regular guy and cut through the politically correct bullshit; he said out loud what a lot of us thought. Warts and all, he came across as genuine.

Hillary kept spewing the same old stuff, got caught in outright lies, and then tried to pass off more bullshit to distort what she’d done, who she was and what she really thought.  She came across as a phony who relied on bullshit more than honesty. 

Want to know why so many here oppose ObamaCare? Again, too much bullshit – you can keep your plan, you can keep your doctor, rates will go down by thousands per family. All bullshit. 

You can dress up bullshit any way you like, but if it still seems like bullshit to ordinary Americans they simply won’t buy it. That applies to blaming humans as the sole cause of climate change, saying illegal immigrants are a plus for our economy and never receive government benefits, and that lax gun laws alone are why “gun violence” is increasing.           

But that’s what our media keep reporting, even when the facts don’t bear them out. That feeds our  distrust of the media. Our media have been caught so many times making up stuff or reporting as fact what turned out to be false, they’ve lost our trust. When Trump called the media liars many Americans knew that was an overly broad overstatement but essentially true. 

That’s why there’s been so little pushback from the general public to his attacks on the media. Which is probably a shock to many in the world because we put such a high value on “freedom of the press.” Sure, the media are outraged as are their fans on the left, but the rest of us are “meh.” Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Welcome to America. 

Relatively easy access to guns here puzzles a lot of people from other countries, too. They seem to be under the false impression – fostered by our media – that we don’t have any real laws to control the sale of guns.  And that gun owners here, especially members of the NRA, fight tooth and nail to stop any reasonable gun control legislation.     

That, of course, is not true.  Despite our Second Amendment, the right to own a gun here has limitations. The NRA is on record as supporting extensive background checks to prevent the wrong people from buying guns.  We also have more than enough laws on the books to prevent people who shouldn’t have access to guns from getting them. 

But those laws aren’t enforced, not because people ignore them or the laws are too loosely written, but because our sloppy and inefficient bureaucracy doesn’t do its job screening out people legally disqualified from buying a gun. Like people with a history of mental illness. People with a history of domestic violence. Convicted felons, etc.

The laws are there. The requirements for background checks are there. But in almost every recent case of mass shootings in America, some bureaucrat dropped the ball. That, and people close to the shooters failed to step up and let authorities know in advance something was dreadfully wrong; rather than risk hurting someone’s feelings they did nothing. 

Incompetence and political correctness resulted in the mass shootings, not the lack of laws controlling access to guns. And not because of the Second Amendment, or the NRA.   

Now, there’s no way you can expect anyone from somewhere else to sit through all this. Yet these are the real answers to foreigners’ FAQs.

But as long as the rest of the world gets their news second-hand from our own media, they’ll never believe you.