What General Electric has in common with the guy who runs Obama’s IRS: not paying taxes. That New York Times report on G.E.’s remarkable ability to avoid paying U.S. taxes has been getting a lot of attention today, but there was one paragraph that reminded me of why I’m a flat-tax guy:
G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.
As government extends its reach over every aspect of the economy, this sort of corporatism will only become more deeply entrenched in fields like health care and energy. What G.E. has done with taxes, the insurance giants will do (and have done) with Obamacare. Everything looks like ethanol.
But I’ll take a little bit of issue with Ezra Klein’s response:
So patriotic! It really explains why President Obama tapped Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s CEO, to lead the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. If this isn’t the sort of corporate behavior America needs more of, what is?
I’m sort of creeped out by this particular usage of the word “patriotic,” as though the alternative to the profit-maximizing corporation were the Great People’s Patriotic General Electric Corporation. (I also intensely dislike the proposition that paying taxes is an expression of patriotism, as though the state were the nation.) But I’ll say this: Yes, this is exactly the sort of corporate behavior America needs more of, inasmuch as our corporate-tax regime is kind of dumb, and also kind of corrupt, and one way of cleaning that up is to abolish it.
In spite of our having the second-highest nominal corporate-income tax rate in the developed world (Hello, Japan!), the rates actually paid by businesses vary wildly according to their political clout. Progressives look at that and see the evidence of businesses’ having undue influence on Washington; I look at that and see evidence of Washington’s undue influence on business. But it’s a two-way street, and the end product smells the same.
There are many arguments for a flat tax: Compliance costs are lower, it’s easier to understand, it doesn’t create a divide-and-conquer dynamic with regard to the tax brackets, it aligns taxpayers’ incentives, etc. But there’s a practical moral argument, too: The tax code is corrupt. Using the tax code as a cookie jar full of special favors for friends and supporters is corrupt. It does not matter that it’s legal, it is immoral. The purpose of taxes is to raise revenue for the government, not to repay political favors or to bribe voters with their own money. I do not think our tax system probably is really salvageable: Obamacare is not the only thing that should be repealed and replaced.
While everybody else was filling out their college-basketball brackets, I was working on my fantasy federal budget (I know, I know, I’m a lot of fun on dates), which is not yet complete, but which I will share when it is. (I’m planning a fantasy-budget reader contest.) My revenue side assumed a true flat tax on all forms of personal income — salaries, benefits, bonuses, dividends, inheritances, capital gains, etc. — and, once I’d trimmed the federal government back as small as I think we could realistically get it, figured that I could fund it with a flat rate of about 20 percent, and no corporate income tax. (I think this might be good for investment.)
The upside of the fiscal crisis that our country insists on marching toward is that it will give us the opportunity to enact radical reform of some of our most important institutions, and the tax code should be high on the list. A federal/state/local system that produces a $3.2 billion tax benefit for G.E. but taxes the pants off of poor people to fund useless schools that do their children very little good (and a great measure of harm, in many cases) is an unbearable burden. It has to go.
— Kevin D. Williamson is a deputy managing editor of National Review and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, just published by Regnery. You can buy an autographed copy through National Review Online here.