Taxes...No More Loopholes...

Just Me

More members of Congress are talking about tax reform more often, now, than at any time in the past - than I can remember.

So whats all the hype about anyway? So what, we adopt legislation that makes our national tax rate a few nominal percentage points of income, blend in a few pieces of laws that make it mandatory for everyone at the same rate and wala, no need to file an income tax for something that's been automated - right?  What a wonderful world that would be.

Suddenly a whole new breed of unemployed hit the unemployed compensation books, and a new breed of public office seekers hit the campaign trail. Just think of all the CPA's, lawyers judges and legal people in general that would no longer have a job just because someone thought of a feasible way to automate the tax-code, i.e. the IRS.  Can you imagine the discussions in that line of freshly unemployed?

The title mentions another word though - loopholes. What is a loophole anyway? See a definition from web here.

Loopholes are almost always the "negotiated" brainchild of a self-interest group through a paid lobbyist. To understand the objective of a generic tax loophole one has to first understand the definition of lobbyist. When this is understood, one realizes that a tax loophole is just another day at work for the lobbyist.

Influence is a key word in this definition and the influence that's most often used is words followed by money. This includes in the definition that "lobbying is often spoken of with contempt, with the implication that people with inordinate amounts of socioeconomic power are corrupting the law (twisting it away from fairness) in order to serve their own conflict of interest."

The interesting word here is the gerund (an "i-n-g" word) form of the word corrupt. The word corrupt comes to us from the early 14th century Latin word corruptus having as its root word corrup which means to destroy and the tus suffix on the end simply means "by breaking or breakage". So the word corrupt means, "to destroy by breaking."

Now, to bring all this together, since the word loophole has as its core, the word corrupt, then tax loopholes are legislation who's very meaning is to bring about a form of corruption at the onset to the interested party or person. Let's be clear about this, the lobbyist is the corrupter, i.e. the corruption-ist as it were.

So, another definition of tax loophole could be, a piece or a body of legislation that favors one person or a group of persons over another person or group with the intent and design of showing fairness, but in fact lays the ground work for the opposite to occur, at the expense of the non-favored group. In doing so, the very idea of a loophole in the tax code ought to be so offensive to Americans that they put it aside, making it (the loophole) foreign to their language and laws.

What do you think?