Part 2: Other Problems so Obvious I Had to Get Retinal Chemotherapy After Reading Them
The reason Ted Cruz amended his “abolish the IRS” comment to “...as we know it” is not only because of Marco Rubio’s humiliating reminder that someone has to add everything up. Anyone who gets on Cruz’s website and looks at the card immediately has questions popping into their head like a child who’s been shown a particularly bad card trick. No pun intended. Only ridicule. Here it is again for reference.
Every single line is a monument to stupidity. At the top, it asks for a Social Security Number, and unfortunately for Mr. Cruz, there are a whole host of people who have an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number). People have these for several reasons, and in broad terms you get one or the other because you have to file US taxes but aren’t a citizen.
And yes, nonresidents file taxes all the time. For instance, if you’re a Canadian who has a branch of your business in the US, you probably have some taxes to deal with. You could be a resident alien’s spouse. My own dad was a resident alien for years because he’s originally from Australia, and I’m pretty sure he only got his US citizenship ten years ago because he was tired of not being able to slam down the voting lever like a sledge hammer and then spend the next four years bitching about how it's not his fault everything is fucked up.
This highlights one of the reasons our tax code is as complex as it is. Perhaps it could have a lot of fat trimmed off, but there’s an unavoidable amount of pedantry a complex society will have to put up with. Excuse me. Up with which a complex society will have to put. You need W–2s to demonstrate taxes taken out by some employers, a W–4 to indicate how much you’d like other ones to take out, a W–7 requests an ITIN and there are a half-dozen forms in the 1040 series alone. For a society that wants to exponentially increase the amount of documentation for background checks on any immigrants or refugees coming into this country, it’s more than a little surprising Cruz wants to eliminate all the paperwork that will make sure we can pay for it.
Speaking of logic and priorities, the next line should have a free ibuprofen tablet glue dotted at the end like a pain relief punctuation mark. It floors me on two levels. Ted absolutely must have your spouse’s SSN, but he doesn’t care about their name. It’s a bold pro-gay marriage statement, and a profound reversal of position from one of the great defenders of traditional marriage. But then, in the eighth line of his online tax plan description, he says he will incorporate “greater anti-fraud and pro-marriage reforms.” For the life of me I don’t know how to resolve that ideological rock tumbler. No name invites great fraud, and the only “pro-marriage reforms” it will enact are, in practice, as liberal as you can get. Perhaps he just writes the whole thing off as some larger Tea Party Constitutional right to privacy or something, but it just goes to show you how stupid people are who are impressed that his tax plan fits on an index card.
A similar absurdity is on the next line, requesting your occupation and your spouse’s occupation. It appears he doesn’t care who your spouse is, but he seems to care an awful lot about what they do. I’m can't say with assurity, but I feel like there’s a racist auditing undertone for anyone who files a return citing their respective occupations as “bartender” and “maid” like Marco Rubio’s parents would have. Regardless, it’s a safe bet that even on an individual return, listing your occupation as “musician” tells the government nothing about what a person might reasonably be expected to pay in taxes other than the fact that they have enough education to spell “musician”. Once again, here comes the trailer full of Ben Wa Balls hitched to the back of the Tea Party Express, hurtling down the Kansas freeways towards the pseudo-intellectual Constitutional gape between the right to privacy and logical continuity.
This brings us to meat and potatoes—perhaps it would be better to say “bratwurst and two baby russets”—of his tax plan’s flaccidity. There are two gigantic, ludicrous pieces of idiocy with his system, the first of which being how he calculates income. Most people may not realize it, but an actual 1040 form is a grand spanking total of two pages. In practice it requires very little of you, other than the critical inclusion of your W–2 documentation. Not only does Ted Cruz’s plan not require them, but he is prepared to take whatever number you write in that box on pure, unadulterated faith—to be fair, the best way of knowing anything according to Ted Cruz.
We're told this plan will allow us to “abolish the IRS as we know it”. The “IRS as we know it” is an organization primarily responsible for two things: collecting taxes, and checking everyone’s returns to make sure they are being relatively truthful. Obviously it is impossible to get rid of the bean counters, because there are going to be a lot of beans to be counted if Ted Cruz is serious about his Balanced Budget Amendment. However, Ted Cruz’s postcard quite literally takes your word on your income, USA savings deposits, child credits, other deductions per line four which are both non-itemized and and incompletely stated by his tax plan (and strange for what is supposed to be a simple flat tax), and crucially, it does not require you to submit any W-2s or any other forms regarding income.
I will repeat that first phrase: Ted Cruz’s postcard quite literally takes your word.
If only that was the end of it. The second idiocy is even worse. There is a massive, massive...massive tax break for the wealthy he’s trying to slide in directly under the noses of the bulk of taxpayers who don’t have “investment income.” The current capital gains tax rate is 15% for the average Joe, and that highest 0.1% who essentially live off their investment income pay 20%. Under the Cruz plan, everyone is paying 10%, and that is a gigantic tax evacuation from our nation's bowels. I would say tax break, but the phrase doesn’t come anywhere near enough to representing the massive toilet flushing of cash that will go out of the system. I hate to have to say it, but I honestly think what he’s hoping for here is that people who can’t afford to hire an accountant will be happy as a clam that they don’t have to think any more, and those who can will be gleefully ready to fill that box in with any number they so choose and make a giant pile of cash to boot.
As despicable as all this is, in the end there's the irony of the fact that he's sort of been telling everyone the truth all along. I have to ask the question: is that, or is that not exactly why Ted Cruz says we need to reform the tax code? He wants a system whereby poor people don’t have to think about the tax code, and rich people can keep as much money as possible. Realize that the product you are buying from this man is designed to patronize the poor and uneducated and empower the rich to further capitalize on them.
Look, this tax plan is nonsense. It’s not believable, realistic, or in any way fully fleshed-out, and any tax organization that endorses it is, I’m sorry, exactly the type of entity being referred to when certain politicians are complaining about super PACs and the organizations referenced over and over on Cruz’s website like the Tax Foundation, a conservative tax think tank according to everyone but them.
This is not a serious offering, and the bastard knows it. He has to know it, because the obviousness of its absurdity is so far beyond the pale that the only people it could be sold to are a collection of voters who are largely willing to take his word, and the word of conservative pundits and organizations. It will not work. It can’t work. It’s patently stupid...
...and therein lies the key to understanding why he’s pushing it.
What if his tax postcard is not intended as a government document? In fact, what if he doesn't even believe himself that it would work? Read it again, but read it as if it's nothing more than a political document. Plain and simple. Not a reality, just a meme on a postcard-sized picture on the internet, and the only reason it’s being taken seriously is because it’s on his website and not on Buzzfeed.
Now, all of a sudden, everything on there makes perfect sense.
That is, in truth, exactly what that postcard is. As an American citizen, I am frankly embarrassed that something like this could gain traction in an election, much less be a major driving force behind a campaign, and it leaves me with a cynical and skeptical outlook. Not just for the process, but for the country as a whole. It’s degrading to the idea of social solidarity to think that this is being accepted at face value on authority—the worst kind of evidence—that people don’t care to spend the thirty seconds it takes to see that his postcard is actually a piece of intellectual swiss cheese, or most frighteningly of all, many people just don't care and decide it's good because they support Ted Cruz.
Unfortunately in an outcome-based world, there is a big difference between believing you’re right and deciding you’re right.
That is a truly terrifying notion, and one which should give this country as a whole pause for reflection. The presidency is serious. Taxes are serious. The world is serious, and the best we can get from a major candidate is Wile E. Coyote’s Acme tax missile with a pair of roller-skates as the best alternative to what we’ve been doing for years.
Delightfully, there’s even more. We haven’t even touched on his corporate tax plan or the nature of the programs he wants to cut.
Part 3: The Ted Cruz Corporate Tax Chode: How to Fuck Poor People From Both Ends at Once.