Flat tax Smlat tax

To respond to the comments from my recent flat tax post: I agree that spending reform is more important than tax reform, if for no other reason than spending reform would likely engender tax reform. The truth is, the federal government wastes money. But worse than that, the federal government spends too much money, by which I mean the federal government has its fingers in too many pies. Education is a good example. Education has been the responsibility of the state government since, well, since the passage of the Constitution. Gradually, the federal government absorbed authority, notably with the creation of the Department of Education (1980) and more importantly with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. Many of us may agree with the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, but with the authority the law gives Uncle Sam comes budgetary and spending requirements. Boom, bigger federal budget. Now couple that with a legislative system such as the one we have, one that creates budgets in the way it does (which is to say, one that, for instance, incentivizes pork barrel projects), and you have a recipe for abuse. I recently read an article that unfortunately I can’t get my hands on now in which the author suggested that the best way to argue for federal fiscal reform is to adopt the platform of states’ rights. This platform returns power to the states; state governments are more accountable and have smaller budgets, so the potential for fiscal abuse and misuse is smaller. Meanwhile Anonymous 2 deploys the rhetorical device of hyperbole to drive his point home. I guess it would have been effective if his point had been on target. But he took my anti-flat tax stance as a pro-high tax stance. Regardless of what one thinks of taxes, one must agree with the statements I made: that the flat tax doesn’t actually reform what needs to be reformed (unless what needs to be reformed in the progressiveness of the tax rates), and that the flat tax will increase taxes on the poor. Those two facts are always left out of the discussion of the flat tax and its purported benefits. Furthermore, if you believe, as I do, in the theory of the declining marginal utility of the dollar, then you support, as I do, a progressive tax rate structure. Nowhere did I talk about raising taxes or about the creation of a utopia or even about the evils of capitalism. Indeed, I love the free market. But the sad fact is that we do not live in the free market that Anonymous 2 thinks that we do. Or how can he explain the massive subsidies that farmers and ranchers and steel companies and airlines and the auto industry receive?