Skip to main content

Not taking the easy shot: tax evasion and the political elite

I have thus far pretty much avoided commentary on the various and sundry administration appointees with tax problems.

Oh, I might have groused in a comment somewhere or other, but I have consciously focused on lobbyists rather than tax cheats.

So, first, I'll get the Libertarain-anarcho-capitalist part out of my system with an extensive snippet of Jim Davidson's rant over at Boston Tea Party:

There's an old saying that "sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." This appears to be an early gender equality cliche.

US trade representative nominee Ron Kirk owes $10,000 in taxes. He earned more than a million dollars last year as a partner in Houston-based law firm Vinson and Elkins. He owes some of the money because of honoraria he received for yakking at events. He owes some of it because he took deductions for his season tickets to see the Dallas Mavericks (some sort of spherical ball team?) which apparently didn't comply with government rules for deductions.

Kirk is not alone. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner paid $43,000 in back taxes before his confirmation. Tom Daschle withdrew his bid to lead the Health and Human Services department, paid $128,203 in back taxes, plus interest.

Labor secretary Hilda Solis is married to some sort of tax deadbeat. And there was some sort of White House aide with a tax problem.

Let's not be unpleasant about these people. They are members of the political class. Paying taxes is for little people, people who are beneath them, people who cannot get cushy jobs at the top of the government.

Let's not criticise their choices, berate them for not paying taxes. Let's not beat them, let's join them.

Americans should stop paying taxes. Go on strike.

Dump tea? No. Keep your tea, but don't pay the tax.


I have two thoughts about this issue, which gives me a fifty percent chance that one of them will have some value.

1) So far the Obama administration has, by the act of nominating these folks, managed to collect nearly $200,000 in back taxes to help fight the deficit. I don't want him to stop nominating tax cheats, I want him to find more of them. Apparently, a presidential nomination to office should become one of the IRS's more effective collection strategies.

Sir, have you considered the fact that your tax debt makes you a prime candidate to become deputy under assistant Secretary of the Treasury? If you'll just send us a cheque for $26,241.68, we'll see that your nomination gets immediately to the right congressional committee.

Given the number of Americans each year who wire money overseas when they discover their relation to various Nigerian princes, I think it would probably work.

2) The difficulty presented by this spate of nominations says little or nothing about the morality or probity of the individuals, but speaks volumes about the nature of elites and social classes in our society.

Apparently it is impossible for any administration--of any party likely to ever hold the White House--to find sufficient numbers of people to accept nomination to high office who haven't either

a) avoided (by mistake) paying tens of thousands of dollars of Federal taxes;

b) avoided (through inadvertence) following the law about employing Guatemalan household help;

or

c) served as a lobbyist for some interest group or corporate interest that seeks bazillions of dollars in government contracts and hand-outs.

Why?

Because we have reached the point where virtually nothing separates the functionality of huge corporations and the State, and the financial health of the two parties has become so intertwined that disaster for one is disaster for the other. Hence, some corporations have become "too big to fail," and the need to give them hand-outs to avoid that failure (while strongly decrying their ineptitude) allows government to proclaim that "the free market has failed."

Materialist Fernand Braudel made an important distinction between capitalism and the free market. He divided economic transactions into three general categories. Daily life involved those small interpersonal economic relationships between individuals, families, and friends. The Free Market involved the direct interactions between customers and merchants, as well as those between merchants, that were generally regulated by municipal or State authorities in order to protect the customers. Above that, Braudel saw the world of Capital, a sphere dominated by people who neither produced, nor transported, nor actually bought or sold commodities, but whose stock in trade was huge amounts of money. These people manipulated whole economies and spread their activities across multiple nations and multiple agencies in order to avoid the impact of regulation.

The point is: there is a point (I can't define it, but when I finish reading Braudel's works in about a decade I'll try) at which there is a line between the Free Market and Capital, and the rules (supply and demand, etc.) or regulations which control the Free Market do not seriously affect Capital.

Governments and Capital are above the laws and regulations made to encompass your life and mine.

So government very rarely manages to shake down Capital. Instead, it uses corporations as tax farmers to collect even more revenue from the customers (or citizens).

But, of course, the way of society--the way of virtually all societies--is that the people at the top level are pretty much exempt from the regulations that govern the rest of us.

Usually, they try not to highlight this distinction: it makes the sheep restless, and mars the illusion that here in America the people govern themselves.

[OK: having finished, I think the IRS tax collection bit in part A was better.]

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...