Just an open thread for discussion.
I agree with Ezra — this is a victory for ethics, but it lowers the odds of a big health care reform passing. Although keep in mind that Daschle may still have an office in the White House. (UPDATE: No, he won’t.)
I’m actually not all that bothered by nominees failing to pay taxes, and then paying up with penalties and interest added. That’s something that happens routinely — and not only to rich people. And it seems likely to me that this wasn’t a deliberate attempt to commit tax fraud. (What’s unusual about Daschle is the scale of his screw-up, because he’s so goddamn rich.)
The corruptions that bother me are more systematic. I’m bothered by Daschle being so rich that he apparently doesn’t think twice about getting a free car and full-time driver; how representative can a government composed significantly of people that rich be?
I’m also bothered by Daschle taking tens of thousands of dollars for speeches from industries that still might end up creating regulatory law for.
“I’m bothered by Daschle being so rich that he apparently doesn’t think twice about getting a free car and full-time driver; how representative can a government composed significantly of people that rich be?”
Okay. But how does getting rid of a single candidate ameliorate that in any way?
President Obama promised that he would bring a “change from business as usual”. Yet he appoints a tax cheat to head the Treasury and tries to appoint two others to top jobs. Why is it so hard to find people who don’t cheat on their taxes for selection to high office? Occam’s Razor leads to the conclusion that most politicians or powerful political activists are tax cheats.
He also promised that lobbyists “won’t find a job in my White House.” Yet we see this:
Why is it so hard to find someone competent to lead an executive department who has not been a lobbyist at some point? Why is it so hard to find 15 people to head up Cabinet positions without picking tax cheats? And what’s really interesting is how many of them have been found as having cheated by not paying taxes for domestic help. Is it just greed in holding onto the tax money, or is it because they hired illegal aliens and couldn’t pay the taxes without revealing that?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we put people in government who wash their own clothes, cook their own meals and raise their own kids?
The Executive department is charged with enforcing the law; how about picking people for it who follow the law?
Here’s an idea. I propse that the IRS automatically annually audit the President, the Vice President, all Cabinet heads and deputies, all Supreme Court Justices and all Senators and Representatives? It seems as though we’d collect millions of dollars extra every year. The people who make, adjudicate and enforce our tax laws ought to pay all their taxes.
This is an excellent idea, and I’d also add state governors to the list.
The only tricky part would be preventing those in power from using their influence to weasel out of these audits. Then again, if good measures were put in place to detect such weaseling, it might serve as a kind of honeypot.
It doesn’t, at all. I should have been clearer — the only victory for ethics here is that people with tall ambitions will, for a little while, feel pressure to make sure that their taxes are up-to-date and squeaky-clean even by stringent definitions.
The larger problems I mentioned in my post haven’t been addressed at all.
I think Daschle is a pretty poor example for all our stresses about government corruption to get hung up on. I mean, I think those stresses are very real and legitimate, and I don’t mean to point out this post as being particularly bad about it. But as far as egregious examples of corrupt behavior — this really isn’t one.
If we were tossing Daschle out because we were changing the system, that would be awesome. But fretting about one person because he’s become a channel for our anxieties about systemic problems that aren’t going to be addressed… I don’t feel good about that.
RonF,
Why is it so hard to find people who don’t cheat on their taxes for selection to high office? Occam’s Razor leads to the conclusion that most politicians or powerful political activists are tax cheats.
Or that most Americans who make more than $200k annually, particularly when it’s not just in straight wages paid by a single American employer, haven’t done their taxes every single year precisely in accordance with every IRS reg and opinion letter ever issued. If most people felt absolutely certain that they’d done their taxes 100% correctly every time, getting audited wouldn’t be seen as such a nightmare. Amp takes the more realistic view: failing to pay taxes, and then paying up with penalties and interest added [is] something that happens routinely — and not only to rich people.
Also, not all lobbyists are created equal. There’s a difference between those that represent entities that donate money to campaigns or give outright gifts to politicians in order to influence policy to that entity’s benefit, and those that go to the Hill and make the case for their organization. I don’t really look at Melody Barnes’s lobbying for the ACLU, LCCR, ACS and CRR as an indication that she’s been doing dubious things; I look at it as a sign that she’s, ever so shockingly, an advocate for liberal causes. (I’d feel the same way about someone who advocated the views of the Fed Soc, e.g. on judicial nominations and confirmations: if a bunch of conservatives and libertarians want to organize and pay a like-minded person to represent their views on the Hill full-time because they don’t have enough resources as discrete individuals, I don’t see the problem.)
To take your last first, I disagree; if you’re being paid to advocate for a particular viewpoint I don’t think you should subsequently be put in charge of the agency that regulates the issue in question. The fact that you happen to agree with the viewpoint being expressed doesn’t take away the conflict of interest. As far as I’m concerned they’re two sides of the same coin.
Those conflicts do sometimes include financial interests, BTW. Take the case of the ACLU. Their lobbyists helped get the law passed that enables Federal judges to reimburse them – with taxpayers’ money, not that of the party committing the injury – for their legal costs in civil rights cases.
failing to pay taxes, and then paying up with penalties and interest added [is] something that happens routinely — and not only to rich people.
That’s a pretty general statement. Got statistics to back that up?
We ended up filing amended returns three years in a row because we kept messing up our taxes. And the one year we went to an accountant to do the amended return, he told us to flat-out lie about something to claim a credit that we almost but didn’t quite qualify for. (We didn’t do it.) And one of my co-workers whose spouse is self- and under-employed at a variety of odd jobs ended up crosswise with the IRS in a really serious way. So did my brother-in-law, who quit a high-paying freelance gig mid-way through the year, then blew through his savings while holding out for a dream job, and had nothing left to pay his taxes at the end of the year.
That’s not statistics, but it definitely happens to the little people, too. (And none of us make anywhere close to $200,000.)
As for Daschle, I was more concerned about the source of his income over the last several years than about his tax situation, but I guess it doesn’t matter now.
RonF,
That’s a pretty general statement. Got statistics to back that up?
The IRS audits based on a computer program that picks out returns that have oddities, such as claimed deductions that are a large percentage of total reported income, or several round figures (claiming that you got paid *exactly* $55,500 last year can be a trigger). Other “high risk” situations are being self-employed (effectively the problem that Geithner ran into; he thought of himself as an IMF employee, but he needed to pay payroll taxes like he was self-employed); and earning high wages. The “rich” (pegged at income $100k or above) are about 4% of all returns; they’re about 8% of tax returns that get flagged for examination.
Assuming that the rich not a disproportionate number of those who have to end up paying penalties and interest, failing to pay taxes perfectly is indeed something that happens “not only to rich people.”
When I got into a lengthy online discussion with a high school acquaintance (ah, what Facebook allows!) about Geithner and Daschle, about whose tax woes he was fairly condemning, he eventually said, “The time they reviewed my taxes wasn’t too terribly painful. For some reason my wife’s people put my social security on her quarterlies even though we file married separately. Needless to say, I got a nice refund and she got an underreporting letter saying she owned taxes, interest and penalties. They waived the penalty issue (woohoo!) after the whole deal was explained, but they still charged interest (boo!, they had the money all along).”
Try asking your acquaintance about whether they’ve ever gotten audited by the IRS, and then of those, how many had to pay the government some money (whether back taxes, interest, penalties, etc.). I bet you’ll find that the vast majority of people who get audited do end up having to pay some many, which means that “failing to pay taxes, and then paying up with penalties and interest added [is] something that happens routinely.”
What IS unusual is the IRS’s finding that someone did this deliberately, i.e. committed tax fraud. If the government took as condemnatory an attitude as you do about people who make mistakes on their taxes — that is, if we had a strict liability regime for tax, like we do for statutory rape — we’d have a lot more white collar criminals in our prisons (probably about a quarter million each year). I suspect that the fact we don’t apply strict liability is our government’s reflecting the view of most Americans that, hey, it’s easy to screw up, and while you should pay what you owe and be penalized monetarily when you don’t, it’s way too harsh to assume that everyone who messes up is a deliberate “tax cheat.”
if you’re being paid to advocate for a particular viewpoint I don’t think you should subsequently be put in charge of the agency that regulates the issue in question. The fact that you happen to agree with the viewpoint being expressed doesn’t take away the conflict of interest. As far as I’m concerned they’re two sides of the same coin.
So Thurgood Marshall shouldn’t have been in charge of the Justice Department (which is an agency regulating civil rights), because Marshall had been paid by the NAACP LDF to advocate for the particular viewpoint that race discrimination was unconstitutional? This seems like it’s going to cut out an awful lot of the people who actually know anything about the issues in question.
Also, not all lobbyists are created equal.
In which case, Dr. Change shouldn’t be issuing blanket anti-lobbyist proclamations.
I’m more interested in why we’re not fixing the tax code with all of these reasons why it’s not working. (And by we I mean the country, not Alas.) Or maybe I’m more interested in why these politicians aren’t trying to fix it, given that they know just how messed up the tax code is.
But the answer is probably that they’ve figured out how to game the system, and tough nuts to everybody who hasn’t. I’m just too jaded for this.
We ended up filing amended returns three years in a row because we kept messing up our taxes. And the one year we went to an accountant to do the amended return, he told us to flat-out lie about something to claim a credit that we almost but didn’t quite qualify for. (We didn’t do it.) And one of my co-workers whose spouse is self- and under-employed at a variety of odd jobs ended up crosswise with the IRS in a really serious way. So did my brother-in-law, who quit a high-paying freelance gig mid-way through the year, then blew through his savings while holding out for a dream job, and had nothing left to pay his taxes at the end of the year.
That’s not statistics, but it definitely happens to the little people, too. (And none of us make anywhere close to $200,000.)
This. My parents are INCREDIBLY scrupulous about their taxes, and I still know they’ve made errors. (They are in a high income tax bracket.) I haven’t been in a high tax bracket, and I believe that paying taxes is a patriotic duty, but I’m a freelance writer — I’m sure I’ve made mistakes.
My grandfather, before his death, was a conservative who felt the government was screwing him over with taxes. He would simply make up income numbers and deductions and jiggle them around until the number he had to pay was $0.
I know that tax cheats exist, and as the case of my grandfather exemplifies, I know that tax cheating can stem from seriously assholish behavior. However, I don’t see anything indicating that Dashle’s behavior is more like my grandfather’s than like my father’s.
Given that mistakes appear to be endemic, I’m again, not comfortable with the amount of attention and angst this is receiving — paricularly when the attention and angst is framed as if it’s about government corruption, when this behavior has little if anything to do with government corruption. Decisions about Daschle’s future may make people feel that action has been taken on issues they care about, but it hasn’t — this is a decoy, a thing to suck up the energy of our real and important anxieties about cronyism and corruption.
Do I think Daschle may be involved in cronyism and corruption, that his appointment (when taken in combination with many similar appointments of people in similar positions) is a sign of problems in government? Yes. But this issue of taxes doesn’t illustrate that, and is a red herring to focus on. If we want to indict cronyism and corruption, let’s do that.
The likelihood of this being willful malfeasance seems pretty low.
I mean, okay, imagine that you’re Tom Daschle. You’re very very wealthy. You are very very wealthy in part because of your political career. You love your political career very much. Are you going to torpedo all hope of future political advancement over what is to you a fairly measly sum?
I doubt it.
—Myca
Technically, Daschle’s malfeasance was deemed greater than Geithner’s; Daschle got hit with penalties. On the other hand, Geithner’s going to run the Treas. Dept and thus the IRS.
I am sad that people will see this as a sign that “everyone” games the system, so why shouldn’t they? I actually kind of agreed with Biden’s remark that paying taxes is patriotic; as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “I like paying taxes, with them I buy civilization.”
I’m not a huge fan of the marriage penalty hitting me this year (my Republican spouse is starting to rethink whether living in sin is really so bad…), but on the whole, I’m glad to live in a city with a 24-hour public transport system, with sufficient police that I’m not afraid to walk home from the office at midnight, with sufficient facilities for the homeless that when I do HOPE it’s not a joke to give the folks on the street info about those facilities; in a state that gives schools enough funding that when I worked with low-income kids, they were all literate and some were truly good writers, in a country that has decent bridges and highways and can pay its civil servants enough that they avoid the most literal forms of bribery and corruption.
I’ve noticed that some people will visit India, be puzzled that the public goods (like roads) are still so bad, and assume that there hasn’t really been much increase in wealth in the country. There HAS — it’s just that the tax-dodging culture is so widespread that the wealth hasn’t filtered fully into public spending. I would hate to see that happen in the U.S.
PG Wrote
That’s a democracy for you…lousy infrastructure and federal planning. I agree that the late bill was much ado about nothing and that the uproar is coming from the scale of the oversight & overall income of Daschle.
As to when we’ll have a representative government with elected officals that aren’t in the 1% of the tax bracket…good luck. That will take a revolution.
Well, I know a lot of people who make, let’s say, over $50,000 (and some over $100,000) and as far as I can tell NONE of them have been audited. So I’m still trying to see actual statistics (as opposed to anecdotes) on just how common making mistakes on the order of $125,000 on your taxes is.
I also think it’s legitimate to hold people elected or (especially) appointed to create and enforce the laws to a pretty high standard when it comes to following them. As Charles DeGaulle once said, “The cemetaries are filled with indispensible people.” We can live withot Tom Daschle in government. Let’s find someone just as capable that pays their taxes and isn’t quite so disconnected from real life.
RonF,
Well, I know a lot of people who make, let’s say, over $50,000 (and some over $100,000) and as far as I can tell NONE of them have been audited.
And I didn’t know this about my high school classmate’s wife’s getting audited until he told me because we were discussing tax audits. And I didn’t know that one of my female relatives had had an abortion in 1979 until she told me in 2005 because we were discussing problems in her marriage. Decent people don’t spill their business to everybody nonstop. (I appreciate this about a civilized society and hope reality TV and Twitter don’t destroy it.) “As far as I can tell” isn’t worth much until you go around and survey everyone you know.
It doesn’t make sense to measure the scale of the mistake by the dollar figure, because obviously some people don’t make $125k in a year, much less owe that much in taxes. If you care about accuracy, it makes more sense to measure the scale of the mistake as a percentage of income or as a percentage of tax owed.
I strongly recommend Marcia Angell, MD for HHS Secretary. Dr. Angell is a physician, author, and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. She currently is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Angell is a woman of integrity. She is highly respected in medical circles. She has worked hard for ethics and scientific integrity her entire career, and writes frequently in professional journals and the popular media on a wide range of topics, particularly medical ethics, health policy, the nature of medical evidence, the interface of medicine and the law, and care at the end of life.
Marcia is not afraid to speak out, and has criticized our current healthcare system and the pharmaceutical industry. She wrote the book: The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. In 1997, Time magazine named Marcia Angell one of the 25 most influential Americans.
I can think of no better person to be HHS Secretary than Marcia Angell, MD. She is eminently qualified, and would bring ethics and integrity to the office. . If you agree, let Obama know at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
Sorry to quote Ezra Klein yet again — but he’s the blogger who follows the politics of health care the most closely, so he’s very relevant on this issue.
Geithner survived because it’s easier for the average person to understand the kind of error he made, which began with using TurboTax for a tax situation that had become more complicated than what the usual employed person faces. When in a similar position, I gave up and hired a tax accountant because I knew it was just too likely that I would make mistakes, but a lot of people try to muddle through.
Killefer’s main problem was that she failed to pay for a considerable period of time a tax that she apparently never disputed was due. Sure, you can make mistakes about whether you needed to pay FUTA on your household help, depending on the circumstances, but once the city files a tax lien, you have to resolve it, not just hope they never get around to enforcing it.
And then there’s Daschle. I have thought about this for about 24 hours and decided that Daschle really should have understood that if he wanted to go back into government service, he needed to forego the receipt of apparently unmerited largesse from people trying to influence government. Not to pay taxes on it is just icing on the cake. Seriously, his judgment didn’t just blur the lines between public and private, it eviscerated them — as if anything that made Tom Daschle’s life more convenient must be an indisputably good thing with no possible repercussions to his reputation for probity, and of course, why wouldn’t someone want to give Tom Daschle 24 hour car and driver service? Honestly, I am pretty jaded, but I found this arrangement to be shocking, and all his considerable skills and relationships notwithstanding, we shouldn’t have to worry whether such a demonstrated lack of self-awareness will work its way into our daily lives in the form of bad policy or law. What it really shows, though, is how insidious the Washington bubble can become, even for people who have served the public well for a long time. It’s too bad.
PG, I’m pretty close with both the people I work with and a number of the people I know in Scouting. I know – and in fact spend a lot of time listening to both direct and 3rd party discussions on – divorces, details of medical issues, custody battles, financial reversals, etc., etc. If there were audits or tax problems going on I’d know.
Amp: yep, words matter. Better said, the ideals they represent matter. There HAVE been way too many cozy arrangements between groups being regulated or legislated and the people regulating or legislating them. There is far too much influence over the direction and policies of this country by people who stand to profit on the basis of what those are.
Tom Daschle may be a good man, I don’t know. It may well be unfortunate that he lost the opportunity to serve in this position. But the concept that our behavior needs to live up to our ideals isn’t just limited to foreign policy. Words and ideals matter, but so do perceptions. A lot of good people are going to end up in Tom Daschle’s position. It’s too bad, but for the good of the country we need to break up “business as usual” and we need the electorate to perceive that we have broken up “business as usual”.
My beliefs that one’s past choices circumscribe future privileges is not just limited to certain groups of people. It even applies to the rich and powerful.
The IRS doesn’t audit rich people enough specifically, and doesn’t audit enough generally. Failure to audit a rich person can net hire returns (like here), while failure to audit someone poor has a much lower return. Pretty much everything I have seen suggests that audits provide significant net gains to the government income stream.
Everyone who pays taxes honestly should be lobbying for more audits, especially of the wealthy.
RonF,
If you’re so close to these folks, I’m sure it wouldn’t be socially inappropriate for you to survey them all on whether they’ve ever been audited. Even people who discuss their medical issues usually don’t like to talk about money, because it’s considered gauche in American social norms. (Out of curiosity, what percentage of the women in your social circle — which apparently is large enough to be representative of the nation — have had abortions?)
As for the idea that everyone who has advocated on an issue shouldn’t be allowed to actually work on that issue in the Obama Administration, it’s now been taken to its (il)logical extreme: even Mickey Kaus, who loathes card-check, is puzzled as to why Hilda Solis, who has advocated for card-check, is conflicted out of being Sec.Labor.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we put people in government who wash their own clothes, cook their own meals and raise their own kids?
Wow. This is still a feminist blog, right? You know what this comment sounds like to me?
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we put people in government who have stay-at-home wives to wash their clothes, cook the family meals, and mind their own kids?”
I take it for granted that most people are going to use the dry cleaners rather than hand-wash their dress clothes, occasionally go out or order in rather than cook every single meal, and use daycare if they have children. I also don’t think it’s asking too damn much for people to pay their taxes—-then again, I fill out a 1040A, and it usually takes me more time to hunt down my paperwork than to fill out the form.
Just wanted to point out the feminist implications of requiring people to “do their own”. (There is a history of the phrase “raise your own kids” being used as an insult against women who work outside the home—but not men.) Even the second shift isn’t enough, y’know? I’d like to see a hell of a lot more diversity in government representation, starting with annual income. I’d like to see the level of women in government match our percentage of the population. I’d also like to see more single parents in government. Basically, I’d like to see more people who have a clue how most of us live be the ones representing us.
La Lubu,
Along those lines, how screwed up is this analysis:
(I know the article as a whole will annoy many people at Alas, but the uncritical use of statistics focusing solely on women’s cooking and not looking at whether men have learned any damn thing in the last 40 years really stood out to me. I do think that decreases in home cooking have contributed to less healthy eating habits.)
Well La Lubu, that may be how it sounds to you but it’s not how it sounds to me. Maybe that’s because I wash my own clothes (including my work clothes, and I have a white-collar job), cook some of my own meals (my wife cooks the rest when we don’t order or eat out) and when my kids were young both my wife and I worked 1st shift and somehow got by without hiring a nanny, a cook, a driver or other in-house domestic labor.
RonF, what’s the moral distinction between taking a kid to daycare and having a nanny in your hosue?
Forget men spending time cooking (a laughable fiction!), none of this can be explained by advances in technology, either. The microwave oven in no way reduces meal preparation time. It’s just laziness that has, of course, led to the increase in fat women.
If only women would get back into the kitchen for that extra 9.5 hours/wk, what a wonderful world full of thin women, who I find attractive, this would be.
/snark
Jake,
If you’re preparing food from scratch, I don’t see how the microwave is much help. It’s certainly useful in nuking leftovers or a TV dinner, but that doesn’t qualify as cooking. My mom has an up-to-date kitchen, and uses a microwave to defrost frozen veggies rapidly, but she probably still spent an average of about 7 hours a week preparing food. Her style of cooking was to do a lot at once, though; she’d make several curries about twice a week and then we’d heat them up for a few nights and just cook the rice fresh in the cooker. (Rice cookers ARE a major advancement — just measure out and then go back to what you’re doing, secure that the rice will cook exactly as much as it should and then be kept warm.) Making chepatis or “tandoori” chicken once a month also took significant time.
I cook all the time and I find that the microwave gets a fair bit of use. It heats liquids faster than the stove does, and it doesn’t burn them. It also allows me to buy bulk meats, butcher them into small cuts, freeze, and defrost for later use.
And of course there’s the “cook ahead and reheat” thing. I mean heck: if you’re going to make tacos for your kids anyway, why not make 3 pounds of filling? It freezes and reheats beautifully. Since that latter strategy saves tons of time (especially if you include cleanup) I think that the microwave is pretty important.
All this food talk is giving me the munchies. Sigh.
when my kids were young both my wife and I worked 1st shift and somehow got by
How? By locking the kiddos in a closet during the day?
Frankly, if you’re interested in playing “gotcha!” when it comes to who does the most household work by themselves, I’ve already got you beat hands down—I’m a single parent; there is no one else to rely on.
What you said not only hearkens back to classic indictments of women who work outside the home; it also bears no real relation to the subject at hand—fitness for government. Paying ones taxes is part of good citizenship, and a very good argument can be made for not allowing tax cheats to either hold elective office or appointed positions within the government. You’ll get no argument from me there! I am merely pointing out that saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we put people in government who wash their own clothes, cook their own meals and raise their own kids?” makes a great many people—and a disproportionate number of women not eligible by your standards.
Is that what you intended to mean? That hiring childcare help puts one outside the norm of U.S. practice? Makes one less likely to relate to the typical U.S. family, and thus should not be in a policy-making position in government?
And you do realize that having childcare assistance isn’t the same as not “raising (your) own kids”? You do realize that folks aren’t telling fathers that they didn’t “raise their own kids” if they weren’t stay-at-home dads, right? You do realize that this is a gendered indictment, right?
Sailorman,
I agree that the microwave making cooking in bulk possible because it allows for quick and easy reheating, but the microwaving is not cooking. You still have to cook the food before you can reheat it.
PG,
As Sailorman says, the microwave heats liquids faster and is great for softening or melting butter. Both of those are tremendous time savers. There are plenty of other uses for a microwave that greatly reduces the amount of time that it takes to prepare a meal. I have to disagree with your statement that, “… doesn’t qualify as cooking.” There are certainly things that can be cooked entirely in the microwave that qualify as cooking. Casseroles can be cooked in a microwave as can, for example, baked potatoes and corn on the cob. I also disagree that reheating leftovers isn’t cooking. My aunt, for example, used to prepare a week’s worth of meals on one day and then freeze them. At meal times, she would reheat those frozen meals in the oven or on the stove. That is cooking. It’s certainly meal preparation. I’ve been using a microwave in my cooking for close to 30 years. Sure, it’s not good for everything, but neither is a frying pan. But it’s a tool – one that saves a great deal of time in meal preparation.
Another great time-saving device for the kitchen since 1965? The dishwasher. Tell me that doesn’t cut down kitchen time. That article is just sloppy in its use of statistics and its unsupported conclusions.
I don’t use the microwave to cook, technically speaking, by which I mean “I don’t use the microwave acting alone to transform things from raw to cooked.”
But of course under that definition I don’t use a sink to cook, either. Or a dishwasher. Or a knife, or a Cuisinart, or anything other than a stove and a pan. And I don’t even get to claim the stove and pan when I’m reheating.
A microwave is an integral part of my food preparation process, by which I mean “the transformation of food from ingredients to plate.” And that’s close enough to “cooking” for me.
Between raw and plate there are a variety of roads that you can go down. All of those roads are cooking.
You cook when you stack your fresh salad greens.
You cook when you fry your new snappy beans.
You cook when you boil your sodden wheatgrass.
You cook when congealing rice into a mass.
You cook when you put some hot milk in a cup;
you cook whether your souffle is down or is up;
You cook when your guests eat your fresh food and rave;
you cook when it’s yesterday’s lunch, microwaved;
If you diss my cook style like some sort of purist;
I challenge you to say what gets off this list.
Kai Jones:
I concur. We should be more concerned about why it seems to be so difficult to pay taxes properly. Taxes should be simple to pay, and our system is long overdue for some reform. The tax code is long and complicated. Also, apparently our tax system is depending on whom you ask, between 2,500 and 2,500,000 pages long and longer than the bible if you ask republicans. Link to representatives on tax code.
I’m not talking about a moral viewpoint at all. I’m just thinking that someone who is dropping off their kid to childcare during the day, with all the minor dramas and schedule juggling that entails is a little more connected to real life for the average American than someone who has enough money to hire in a nanny and leave it to them. As far as whether/how this disproportionately affects women – hm, I suppose so. Hadn’t thought of that. That was not my intent. I’m just saying that I’d like to see people in office that have more direct experience on what reality is like for Americans.
Microwave cooking? We use them for steaming vegetables. Also for melting butter for popcorn (but not for the popcorn itself, microwave popcorn is an abomination) and for thawing stuff out. But personally I think that microwave ovens were invented for reheating Italian food – spaghetti, mostaccoli, lasagna, etc. I swear, the stuff tastes better the day after you cook it. I think it gives the spice flavors longer to diffuse into the sauce.
The tax code is long as Hell and more difficult to change because just about every line of it has a special interest group that fought like crazy to get it written in there in the first place, likes it just fine the way it is, and has plenty of money to lobby Congresspeople to keep them from getting changed.
How simple do you want to make it? A flat tax where the first (oh, say, $12,500 x # of people in the household) of income is exempt? Or a somewhat progressive one with the same kind of exemption?
Think about what you’d want to keep or get rid of. Want to keep the mortgage interest exemption? Dump that and you will really raise the costs of owning one’s own home and hit the housing industry hard. Differing rates between wage income and capital gains income? Encouraging investment means more money is available for loans and capital improvements which in turn helps create jobs.
The tax code definitely needs to be simplified. But our tax code not only has the objective of raising money to fund governmental functions, it is being used as a means to encourage certain kinds of both financial and social behavior and discourage others. For example, taxing fuel and then using the money to build roads links the governmental function with it’s direct beneficiaries and users. But taxing cigarettes and then just throwing the money in the general funds is more of a social engineering function to raise money while discouraging cigarette use.
Do we want to change that? Do we want to stop trying to do anything with the tax code but raise money for the government and tie it to the users of the services being funded where practical? Leave social engineering objectives in there and you invite the labyrinth we have now with constant arguments about what’s going to go in and come out.
Some of this stuff is based on theory – make it easier for people to buy houses and everyone benefits. I get a house I otherwise might not be able to afford, people get jobs building houses and making the necessary materials, etc., etc.
Sorry if I’m going on here. But the idea is that we’ve got thousands of ideas like this all expressed in our tax code. There are different bases for having them in there, varying levels of actual (vs. theoretical) effectiveness, different purposes, different groups of advocates, etc. It’s a Gordian knot. Taking the sword to it is REAL tempting. But we’re going to need a solid proposal to back it up before we do. What would you all propose?
I’m just thinking that someone who is dropping off their kid to childcare during the day, with all the minor dramas and schedule juggling that entails is a little more connected to real life for the average American than someone who has enough money to hire in a nanny and leave it to them.
I could agree with this, but I also think “institutional” daycare is so demonized that it’s hard for me to imagine a family that has the money to afford in-home care not going the nanny route. I agree with everyone who has said that in general it would be nice if our government were more representative of ordinary people (and in Daschle’s case, the bubble that led him not to think of a driver and car as income was at least as much of a problem as the unpaid taxes). But people who rise to the top of the sort of fields these people come from tend to make a lot of money and they tend to take advantage of the kinds of things money allows you to do – like hire household help. Unless we’re going to change our entire economic structure, it seems useless to say they should do things the way we do them, even though they have the money to do things in a way that makes their lives easier, just so they can keep the common touch.
As for the microwave, I use it to steam vegetables, bake potatoes, cook winter squash and the like, and I use it to cook a single scrambled egg for my kid when we’re making something he won’t eat. It’s a time saver for some things, but if you actually cook, you’re still spending a fair amount of time in the kitchen. I think the decline in hours for women is more from more sharing of work between partners and people just cooking less than it is from appliances. The appliance argument makes sense if you’re comparing us to 1900, but not so much to 1965.
I’ve been a tax professional for over 30 years, and I have yet to meet anyone who dealt with our tax system in any professional capacity for longer than a few months who did not think that it needs wholesale reform.
However, that said, Mr. Daschle is a sophisticated (and wealthy) Washington insider who, if he does not understand the way the tax code, imperfect as it is, impacts his behavior, is well able to hire experts to ensure his compliance. (Who exactly does prepare his returns, and why didn’t they catch this?) He’s also a savvy character who surely knows or should know what the impact of news like this was likely to be on any aspirations he may have had to high office.
If you receive expensive goods as a part of your recompense for services (and no one contends that these were just personal gifts as most of us understand that term) then you have to pay income tax on the fair market value of these goods. This is NOT cutting-edge, brain-surgery tax law. Just about anyone who knows anything about the system at all could figure that out.
Eliminating all the easy answers like innocent mistake, then, what are we left with? We are left with the arrogance of a wealthy, powerful man to whom it has not yet occurred that he has to play by the same rules as everyone else, and that in a democracy he will be penalized if he doesn’t.
If that’s what we have here, then his elimination does not lessen the chances of health care reform, it strengthens them. We need someone honest and alert to champion this very difficult reform, and this guy apparently doesn’t qualify.
RonF:
I personally wouldn’t have a problem with either a flat tax (only applied to those that make a certain amount) or a progressive income tax as far as simplification is concerned. To me the problem isn’t with the type of tax, it’s all the rules and exemptions we put on top of it. If we had a tax system with no exemptions, or one exempetion, or only a handful it would be simple. It’s the fact that we have so many exemptions that makes it difficult.
What I would propose is that we have a tax system with as few rules/exemptions as possible. This would ideally lead to a simple tax system, which I find would be more productive for us all.
thebigmanfred,
See the 1986 Tax Reform, which reduced the highest marginal rate to 28%, but made up the revenue by increasing the bottom rate to 15%, expanding the reach of the AMT, taxing all income at the same rate (no special rates for dividends and capital gains) and killing a lot of other exemptions, credits and shelters.
PG, I’ll check that out as I’m only vaguely familiar with it. I won’t comment on it much without reading further on it other than to say that I think the goal is laudable.
thebigmanfred,
I probably didn’t make my point very clearly, but what I meant to say is that we have tried simplifying the tax code before, and it generally doesn’t stick. Frankly, we’d probably have to make the tax code part of the Constitution for it not to get altered by the next Administration with a willing Congress.
PG, I don’t disagree with you there. Without some preventative measures to prevent complicating the tax system any changes will eventually lead to a complicated system again. So while we can reform the system currently (it terms of possibilities not likelihood), to make meaningful change we would also need to guarantee that the reform couldn’t be changed easily. Any reform right now though I think would be wishful thinking, as it’s unlikely anyone will do it in the current economic climate.
I was around and in practice in 1986, and we didn’t try very hard to simplify the tax code in that year. (Practitioners like myself called it The Tax Complification Act of 1986.) The claim that this humongous piece of legislation “simplified” the Code was 100% smoke and mirrors, and was a laughing-out-loud joke among those of us who were trying to make the thing work ha ha.
We won’t “simplify” the Code until we really want that, however laudable a goal such simplification might be. I don’t see much of a constituency for simplicity right now. We have other problems – the economy, the war, health care – which seem more pressing, even to me, and I struggle daily with this monster.
That the Code is “complicated” is no excuse for Mr. Daschle, who made a very simple “mistake,” and who had ample resources to hire experts to sort it out for him if the idea that you have to pay income tax on payments for services is too “complicated” for him.
I’m still wondering who does his returns, and how whoever it was missed something this obvious. And how someone who’s been around as long as Mr. Daschle could think that this kind of thing wasn’t going to tank him when people found out about it, which they were sure to do as soon as he was nominated for a Cabinet post.