Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, wants to reform our tax system, and he wants it badly. His Senate career will end next year, and he seems desperate to write his legacy as a reformer. His dedication is admirable, but desperation can lead to mistakes. Back in June, Baucus and the Ranking Member of his committee, Sen. Orin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, came up with an interesting approach to tax reform in an attempt to capture the attention of other senators to their cause. They called it the “blank-slate” approach.
Blank slate works like this. You start by wiping out all what inside the beltway is known as tax expenditures – all the goodies in the code that benefit certain groups. Some of the best known of these are the exclusion from income of employer-provided health care, or the deduction for contributions to charities, or the home mortgage interest deduction. Things like that. There are a lot of them – more than a trillion dollars’ worth. Then, Baucus asked his fellow senators to basically add back tax breaks they favored, making a case for why they should come back into a new tax code.
He got few takers, it seems. That’s because Baucus forgot, apparently, who he was dealing with. Politicians; you know, cowards. So, he changed the deal. He got the Finance Committee to pledge to effectively lock up until the end of 2064 any submissions it receives from senators in response to the call for feedback on tax provisions that should make it into a new tax code. That’s 50 years. This supposedly prompted more senators to help Baucus design his new tax code. And that’s where I think he made his mistake. Because I believe senators should be accountable to the people who hired them; you know, us.
With respect, there’s a word for this kind of a secrecy scam. Crazy. It seems to me that while it may not be secret law, it gets a little close to making law in secret. I realize it may be a novel idea to argue that the people have the right to know what groups their lawmakers think should get favors from their tax laws, but it’s a good idea.
There’s a group called Taxpayers for Common Sense that is sending a letter to Senators Baucus and Hatch urging them “to make all correspondence with the committee relating to this tax reform public in real time.” On behalf of Tax Analysts, I signed on to that letter. For more than 40 years, Tax Analysts has fought (and sometimes quite literally that) for transparency in the making and administering of our tax laws. My involvement in that crusade has illustrated that there are creatures out there that are seriously afraid of the sunshine. There’s a word for them, too – which I will leave to the reader’s imagination.
Original Publication URL: http://www.taxanalysts.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/UBEN-99YPH9?OpenDocument
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