The Daily Mislead notes that President Bush, in his acceptance speech Thursday night, complained of the complexity of the American tax code:
President Bush said a "drag on our economy is the current tax code, which is a complicated mess, filled with special interest loopholes." Bush noted that the American people were saddled with "6 billion hours of paperwork and headache every year," and said that he was the candidate to create "a simpler, fairer" system.
That line jumped out at me when I watched the speech. Here is a man who has spent three years rewriting the tax code in his own image. The "current tax code" is a creature of his own making. It is the Bush tax code. He crafted that "complicated mess." He signed into law many of those "special interest loopholes" — Hooters & Polluters anyone? George W. Bush is the first president to run for a second term by blaming all his problems on the previous administration.
The DM questions Bush's credentials for creating a "simpler, fairer" system based on his track record on taxes, which is far from simple and anything but fair. They cite IRS statistics on complexity to show that during his three years in office the tax code has gotten considerably more complex:
According to official Internal Revenue Service estimates from 2000 to 2003, "the time required for the set of forms associated with the 1040 has increased by 3 hours and 8 minutes." The average taxpayer spent 1 hour and 29 minutes longer filing his or her taxes in 2003 than in 2000.
I've mentioned before that these IRS figures seem to overstate the difficulty of filing taxes. They suggest, for instance, that the 1040EZ form takes "an average of 3 hours and 43 minutes" to complete.
This is impossible. Really. If it takes you nearly 4 hours to fill out the 1040EZ then you can't also be capable of holding down a job in the first place, so you don't have to worry about it.
But while these IRS figures may be ridiculously inflated, the numbers cited by the DM are still useful in that they compare two sets of IRS statistics against each other.
What that comparison shows is that President Bush's tax shifts in 2001, 2002 and 2003 made the tax code even more complex for those who file the long form.
That, of course, is part of what they were designed to do.
As Stephen Moore, Grover Norquist and the other advocates of Bush's "ownership society" agenda have made clear, its goal is to replace America's progressive income tax with something regressive and "simple" like a flat tax or national sales tax.
These schemes have little to recommend them other than simplicity. They will make the tax code immensely less fair, less proportional, less effective for raising revenue.
So if all you have to argue for your agenda is "simplification," then you also need to make the current system seem very, very complex and to argue that this complexity is a problem that outweighs every other consideration.* It becomes easier to argue this dubious point if you actually increase the complexity in the system. This is also part of the agenda behind Bush's alphabet soup of proposed new tax shelters for the wealthy — HSAs, PRAs, FTPs, etc.
In the meantime, the "haves and the have-mores" that Bush calls "my base" won't complain about that extra hour and a half their taxes took to file this year. As Bush himself likes to point out, these people have hirelings to file their taxes for them. And since the top 1 percent of taxpayers reaped an average kickback of $78,460 from these tax shifts, they won't mind paying their accountants a tiny bit of OT.
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* It's also possible, because "evidence" of complexity is politically useful for the Bush administration, that the reason the IRS says that filing taxes is so implausibly difficult, and increasingly difficult every year, is that this is what they have been instructed to report. To believe this, however, one would have to take the cynical view that this administration would stoop to politicizing and misrepresenting simple statements of economic data. Hmmm.
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