I am not talking about stupid laws that were just left on the books forever, like laws that require someone to walk in front of a car from over a hundred years ago. These are real laws that cost tax payer money for no benefit to anyone except the federal employees who enforce them and the Congressmen who wrote them, and the lawyers who haggle over them for a living.
The best thing about laws is that so many of them are not enforced. There is no shortage of stupid laws. I will post links here. http://www.dumblaws.com/ For example in my state: You can be stopped by the police for biking over 65 miles per hour. In order for a pickle to officially be considered a pickle, it must bounce. It is illegal to dispose of used razor blades. You cannot buy any alcohol after 9pm or on Sundays after noon on Sunday. It is illegal to discharge a firearm from a public highway…. It goes on and on.
But the stupid laws I am talking about are the every day laws we have in America. Anti drug laws, seatbelt laws, anti texting laws…. I mean we don’t need to tell people drugs are bad do we? If so, isn’t putting them in jail enough? Do we need ad campaigns on every radio station and TV station and bilboards… All paid for by, well, who else?
And no one will argue that seat belts are a bad thing. Certainly texting while driving is as distracting as, say, having five children fighting in the back seat. But we aren’t going outlaw the children, are we? How about just saying we can’t drive distracted and leave it at that? Do we need to list all the possible distractions with different punishments for each kind? Do we need constant barage of ads like with the drugs?
How much do you think the seat belt laws cost the tax payer? Just the radio and television ads should be enough, but that cost isn’t the cost of the law. The cost of the law is the cost of all the politicians, lawyers and federal employees who get paid writing, revising, arguing, defending, prosecuting and regulating . Couldn’t we just all agree seatbelts are good and make a single law against stupid behavior and move on? How many people make a good part of their living on seat belt laws? How many lives would we save if we just enforced the seatbelt laws with all the other traffic laws and left the rest of the seatbelt industrial complex alone?
I don’t think anyone alive thinks our income tax system is a good system. I don’t think many people would even say it is a better tax system than any other country, unless it is compared with a lack of a system at all. The only thing worse than our system would be a corrupt system. Ours isn’t overtly corrupt, it is just stupid. Although it is corrupt in many ways as well as the rest of our stupid governmental system of laws. The only ones who profit from our tax system are, again, government employees, those who write the laws, and the lawyers. Well, in the case of taxes there is an entire industry vested in being sure it remains complicated, headed by HR Block and the like.
Don’t get me wrong, personally it is good for me that the system is incomprehensible. 20 years or so ago I was audited and learned how the system works, and the complexity works for my advantage now. Having my own business and property give me a wealth of things to spend money on instead of giving it to Uncle Sam. It is competely legal, or at least entirely defensible in an audit, but if it weren’t for the tax structure we have I would definitly spend my money differently. And I don’t think the things I get tax deductions for buy profit anyone that needs particularly needs to profit.
I mean, the charity deduction is not one that I over use. I suppose I could and people would benefit. I certainly benefit from deductions for paying my mortgage. And being over extended in that way, the way many Americans are at this time, assures that I don’t pay very much in taxes, using all those deductions.
So why is there a deduction for charity, for paying a mortgage, for insulating a house? Who does it help if I insulate my house? Me, of course. So why does the government want to give me incentive to help myself?
The human animal has to try to make sense of nonsense. The reasons our tax codes are so strange is, well, there really is not reason. They are unreasonable. The laws probably have history and explanation, but the point is that the industries that profit from complicated taxes want taxes complicates. Politicians, federal employees, lawyers, and a whole industry of accountants and tax professionals benefit from shuffling money. They don’t add wealth to the country, they just help shuffle it from one national pocket into another. This is one example of trickle down that works a little bit, because the richer people probably spend more doing their taxes than poorer people do. But I don’t think many people argue that the rich pay their fair share of taxes. Everyone knows that working middle class pays almost everything. It just comes out of the paycheck.
I knew a guy who got a doctor’s degree in chocolate. He knew a lot about chocolate. It seems to me there should be more to know about chocolate than taxes. But the opposite is true. Thousands more more people have doctorates in disciplines and studies that keep up with the US tax issues than chocolate, I am sure.
Copyright 2011 Kent Johnson
