Had Donald Trump never entered politics, never become
President, his billion-dollar-plus tax-return losses reported by The New York Times would still have
happened. And no one is so naïve as to
think that Trump is alone in exploiting the tax system, if not mocking it. The alternative minimum tax, in place long
before the Trump-Times study decade, is
supposed to curtail claimed-loss shenanigans by the 1%ers. But they don’t
pay it and hardly ever have. Working
people pay it. (I paid it at least once.) Sure, we should go after tax fraud. But I’d like to see our congressional leaders
talking about unfairness in the tax system as it exists in law. That’s Congress’s wheelhouse, after all.
Let me issue the perennial reminder that personal income
taxes are fully transparent, public, and online—for everyone—in
Norway, and they always have been public, if only more recently online. Yet the sun still shines there—most places, most
of the year—and people get on just fine. It turns out that knowing what other people
earn in income does not undermine or destroy society. In fact, transparency might generate overwhelming
positive consequences, such as a better informed therefore better functioning
free market for labor, and, lo and behold, public confidence in government and tax equity.
America has a weird ethic about salary secrecy. My pay is online; you can look it up at
Mass Live. Look for my wife there,
too, so you know what our household income is.
And then explain to me why we owed thousands of dollars in taxes this
year even after we reduced our 2018 W-4 deductions to zero and supposedly got a rate
cut. (Spoiler alert: Pretty sure the IRS over-cut withholding to create short-term economic stimulus at later public expense.) I’d tell you what we make right here,
but I learned the hard way that people at my workplace hate when I talk openly about
salary. There’s some social taboo, I
guess, that I never learned. Anyway, 🤙.
Here’s my modest proposal.
We don’t have to be Norway. But
how about, when you’re elected to federal office, executive or legislative, your tax returns, back some
number of years and going forward some number of years, are entered into a
public database. We see
politicians herald the release of their returns; that’s the norm we hold up
as desirable. So let’s formalize it. Simple and nonpartisan. These are people holding public jobs, paid from the public fisc. So we know their earned incomes. What’s left
to hide?
Maybe if we saw everyone’s taxes in Congress, as well as the President and Veep, we’d finally get
meaningful and bipartisan tax reform.
