What’s Hot On “We The People”
It has never been easier to get a petition going. Just log onto whitehouse.gov and follow the instructions. If you get 150 signatures, your petition will go into a searchable database. If you get to 25,000 the Administration is committed to a formal response. Given the drama around the fiscal cliff, you might think that budget and taxes would be attracting a lot of attention on We aThe People as the site is called. You would be wrong. The petitions attracting the most attention concern the Westboro Baptist Church. I think the best thing to do is ignore those morons to the greatest extent possible. There are about a half million people who think sterner action is required either officially declaring them a “hate group” or revoking their exempt status. Next comes independence for Texas. That’s just the most popular secession petition. I think there are like seven others. All states that have tried it before. It didn’t work out so well the last time. Deporting Piers Morgan for dissing the Second Amendment is trending towards 100,000 signatures. Removing marijuana from the controlled substances lists counts me as signature 80,483.
At any rate, study of the petitions makes one sympathetic to the view of the Founders that direct democracy was maybe not such a hot idea. You have to go to the ninth petition before you get to budget and tax matters – Repeal Obamacare. It is well ahead of the Death Star petition, which I found irresistible. You need to do a topic search to find a targeted tax petition.
Establish a flat federal income tax! Simple, understandable, enforceable, and fair.
What is wrong with that ? Nothing really, if you ignore the last nearly 100 years of tax history. The problem with an income tax is that defining income is inherently complex. It is true that a significant amount of the complexity in the Code comes from a seemingly irresistible impulse to view tax provisions as free lunch ways of doing socially tinkering. It would be nice if we could stop doing that. There would still be a core of unavoidable complexity. Among the most complicated things in our tax law are the at-risk rules, the passive activity loss rules, related party rules and the (don’t get me started) 704(b) regulations. None of those are social tinkering. They are all responses to the ways in which people will cleverly seek to structure transactions to legally avoid taxes under rules that were previously simpler.
A New Initiative
Many of my readers are people who grapple with the complexity of our income tax system. Then there are my fellow tax bloggers, most of whom seem to be prudently hanging onto their day jobs. I would think that we might be able to come up with some tightly focused petitions to prune a few needlessly complex provisions from the Code. If any of you post a petition like that and provide me with a link, I promise to write about it. So far we have two. Robert Baty’s petition is to eliminate Code Section 107 which allows “ministers of the gospel” to exclude housing allowances from their taxable income. I’ve put up a pretty radical proposal that is based on the idea that the individual income tax should tax, well, individuals, not families. I propose that our current system of four possible filing statuses be reduced to one. Neither one of our petitions has passed the 150 threshold to make it searchable, but Bob’s is trending strongly to triple digits.
Other Interesting Petitions
You may find it at least entertaining to spend some time on We The People. Just up is a petition to award a Cold War Service Medal. Obviously somebody appreciates the way my big brother kept the Russians from putting missiles in Cuba, when he wasn’t busy recovering Mercury astronauts. There is a petition on gender reassignment surgery. The half million or so people who want to do something about the Westboro Baptist Church might take heed of the slippery slope. There is a petition to define the Roman Catholic Church as a hate group. On a more inspiring note, there is a petition to commission the first starship Enterprise. That would even be better than a Death Star.
You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.
Originally published on Forbes.com Dec 31st, 2012