26 March, 2009

Obama Looking at Tax Code Overhaul

According to Bloomberg, President Barack Obama (D-USA) is looking at ways to overhaul the tax code. I applaud the effort. It’s the first good idea I’ve heard come out of this administration.

Austan Goolsbee, a senior economic adviser to the president, will be named staff director of the task force, which will report back to Volcker, Orszag said. Members of the panel will include Harvard University’s Martin Feldstein, former chief economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan; Laura D’Andrea Tyson, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton; Roger Ferguson, chief executive officer of Teachers Insurance & Annuity Association and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve; and William Donaldson, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Orszag said “the only constraint” on the task force review is that there be no tax increases during 2009 and 2010, and that the proposals shouldn’t raise taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year.

I’m fairly certain the results will be a dismal failure, but I’ll hold out hope.

Of course, there’s one simple way to do it and to meet Obama’s requirements and to solve our economic crisis at the same time.  Yes, I know I’m beating the FairTax dead horse, but I’ll continue to pound on this issue as long as I have this blog.

Please check out the FairTax official site. I love their new slogan:

Think of it as the World’s Biggest Economic Jumper Cables

I believe that if we are to survive as a nation, we must abolish the income tax and replace it with some sort of consumption tax. The longer we delay doing this, the worse off we’ll be. This is one place where we need to be following western Europe’s example. Most countries there have one already. Theirs tend to be VATs which is a much worse model than the FairTax, but at least it’s better than what we have now.

2 comments:

  1. You know, I find it truly amazing that the White House can lash out about the whole AIG thing and then turn around and appoint
    Martin Feldstein to the Tax Reform group. I guess one of the many things not changing in Washington is the double standard; I wonder if ACORN took a swing by this guy's house on their bus tour?

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  2. You're missing the whole point about the AIG brouhaha. This was a carefully orchestrated event by the Obama administration designed to distract Americans from their failures by whipping them up into a frenzy over nothing.

    $165 million? Out of $170 billion?

    When we've just passed a $3+ trillion "stimulus package" that has hundreds ofbillions of dollars of pork? That doesn't even stimulate anything?

    And a $400 billion budget also with billions of dollars of pork?

    Way to keep your eye on the big picture folks.

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