🚀 go-pugleaf

tporczyk@netcom.com (Tony Porczyk) writes: 

>Frederick Scott (fred_s@netcom.com) responded to Thomas Disque:
>
>> All I was doing was questioning whether this tax bill wasn't an attempt to
>> advance pro-business and pro-rich interests under a cloak of "simplication".
>          ^^^^^^^^^^^^
>> If your response were indicative of how the real sponsors would answer,
>> one would assume that it was.
>
>[FLAME ON]
>
>And what the bloody hell is wrong with "pro-business?"  You want to live
>in a statist paradise, go right ahead, but don't try to tell me how
>wonderful that life is.  Contrary to you, *I*'ve been there.

Nothing is wrong with being pro-business - or at least I don't want to
argue about that.  That seems to me to be one of the fundamental differences
that divide people in today's political world and anyone familiar with
current events is likely to know all pro and con arguments.  I have no
desire argue it out here.

But if you will take the time to think about what I wrote, you'll see the
gist of my objection has not much to do with being anti-business and a lot
to do with obfuscation.  If you want a pro-business tax bill, why not just
jettison corporate income taxes and capital gains taxes and jack up personal
income tax rates (or cut spending) to make up the difference?  But _noooooo_.
Conservatives can't get that through Congress or past President Clinton given
the current political situation.  So they make up a "tax simplication" bill.
If they _really_ wanted "tax simplication", what they could do is move to
eliminate the 80 zillion loopholes in the existing income tax structure and
they could whittle the 10-40 form into a single piece of paper in no time
flat.

Of course, that's total political fantasy because you can't get that past all
the special interest groups who pay the campaign expenses of all the
Congressmen, Democrat and GOP alike.  But then, so is the flat tax bill for
the exact same reason.

I guess is all I'm saying is: if we're going to engage in political fanatasy,
let's engage in *honest* political fantasy...

Fred