On my way to dinner tonight, I found myself thinking of a few political issues. Just some unanswered questions that run through my head that I don’t care to really know the answer to. Well, I kind of care about the answer, but I don’t think the people that profess to have the answer are objective enough to have an unbiased answer. Such is the current political climate where no one trusts anyone else.
Anyway, I was thinking about left vs. right and how the right always accuses the left of overspending on social programs. They’re too expensive, they always get more expensive. Doesn’t anyone consider that there is a growing population? It would make logical sense that if the population is growing, the cost of providing social services for that population will grow as well. Solution: we need less people. Welcome to my soapbox.
The other argument is that social services make people dependent on government. The right claims that they want all people to be independent and self-supporting. Well, not really. They want people to be just as dependent on government, too, but instead of offering social services, they offer security. And how is that benefit sold? Through fear. Fear of anything and everyone. It used to be fear of external sources: communists, Islamic radicals, Chinese superpower. That’s been supplanted by fear of internal sources: your fellow Americans. So to summarize, you can get your shackles in your choice of color: red or blue.
But the original point of my post was not intended to be political, it just ended up that way because I was thinking about the stalemate on the debt ceiling and how our government needs more revenue to support the left’s social services and the right’s defense/offense initiatives. The best way to do this is to make sure everyone pays taxes. The best way to do that is by enacting the FairTax. When I hear that there is a way to make drug dealers and illegal under-the-table laborers pay taxes, I’m fully in support of it.
The FairTax has been stalled many times and I suspect quite a bit of it is because of the enormity of change it involves. Much like any huge undertaking, like converting to electric vehicles, it’s a balance between building the infrastructure and building the products. In this case, the product is the FairTax, and the infrastructure is how to capture and report that revenue.
So, how much closer could we get if someone like Amazon made a press release saying “our website code is ready to support the proposed implementation of the FairTax.” And a month later, EBay/PayPal announce their sites are ready to go once it is enacted. If these two major shopping companies embrace and proactively adopt this concept, it could put pressure on other companies to be prepared, just in case. Then when most everyone is ready to handle the change, it’s a tacit acceptance of the change itself.
And isn’t that a wonderful reversal: having businesses tell the government how they want to handle revenue reporting?
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