How Progressive Tax Policies Hurt Families

"Before families can understand how tax reform would help them, they need to know how the current tax system is hurting them," writes Curtis S. Dubay in How Tax Reform Would Help American Families. He argues that that most families have no idea the damaging effects of the current progressive tax system, which are largely hidden from view.

Dubay catalogues the many problems in the progressive tax system, including (a) rates that are too high, that are too biased against saving and investment, and that wrongly pick winners and losers.

Showing how substituting the current investment/income tax system with a consumption tax system — i.e., the traditional flat tax, a consumed-income flat tax, a national retail sales tax, or a combination of these methods — would benefit families and the nation's economy, Dubay concludes:

Clearly, all of these effects would substantially benefit families. According to the Tax Foundation, the economy could grow as much as 15 percent more over 10 years because of tax reform. After those 10 years, the average American family’s wages would be almost 10 percent higher. That would mean an extra $5,000 in the pockets of families making $50,000 per year (roughly the median income in the U.S. today).  

Read his full Heritage Foundation report.


For those not familiar with how the current progressive tax system punishes work and investment — and pits neighbor against neighbor — here's a short YouTube video by PragerUniversity that explains it rather well:

Can Good Government be Restored?

Three headlines at Real Clear Politics early this morning suggest it will take herculean efforts by a determined Congress to purge political corruption in federal agencies and restore a modicum of good government.

• IRS Lawlessness: 20 Hard Drives, Six Unanswered Questions (IBD) shows how flagrantly the administrative state circumvents accountability.
• The ObamaCare-IRS Nexus (Kim Strassel, WSJ) reveals the depths of political manipulation and corruption to which IRS has already sunk in implementing the Obamacare law.
• Fast-Tracking ObamaCare to the Supreme Court (WSJ) looks at how court packing, judicial jurisdiction manipulation and intimidation may yet be used to rewrite even the most unambiguous texts of the ObamaCare law. 

Congressional investigations uncovering corruption are not enough. Desperately needed is a systemic overhaul of federal laws by Congress to strip federal agencies of the administrative powers that have enabled political corruption to grow into malignancy, as Philip Hamburger argues in Is Administrative Law Unlawful?,  and to restore to the states authority that was originally designed to be theirs, as David Corbin and Matthew Parks argue in Is There Enough Courageous Conservatism: Combating the Arsenal of Progressivism.

Good government can be restored, but only by a reform-minded Congress dedicated to revising existing laws to conform to the principle that the best government is that which governs least.

"School Reform Gets Cool"

"A whole lot of 20- and 30-somethings across the political spectrum now believe something’s seriously flawed in our public-education system," writes Naomi Schaefer Riley. Why the sea-change?

• Teach for America has for decades place recent graduates from top colleges — some 28,000 to date — as teachers in some of the nation's worst schools. "The incompetence and corruption are hard to forget," and "they talk about it to their peers, too."
• Urban areas are looking attractive to hip younger people who are marrying and starting families, and the terrible state of urban schools presents a roadblock to be challenged and overcome.
• Teachers unions are looking like dinosaurs bent on protecting undeserving members while preventing kids from getting a decent education.
• Vouchers, charter schools, and parent-trigger laws have become "the hot cause of the millennial generation."

"Finally," concludes Riley, "a popular trend worth getting behind."