Our next presidential candidate to be featured in our series of interviews is Sam Brownback, a Republican and Kansas Senator.
Here are his unedited answers to my six questions:
1. What’s the single most important tax issue facing Americans today?
The most important tax issue facing Americans today is Social Security reform because the majority of Americans believe it has to be reformed to remain solvent. And so we can do something about it if the majority of voters favor taking action on the right plan. Secondly, a rewarding solution in SS can lead to the best solutions, strengthening individuals and families, in income tax and Medicare taxation, in order to make certain seniors will get their promised benefits, and younger Americans will have brighter futures.
2. If you could only make one “quick fix” in terms of an extra credit, a disallowed deduction, whatever – what would it be?
Your second question has the terms wrong. We don’t need another tax credit in the existing income tax system. We need choice: file your income taxes with all your current deductions, or with your new flat-rate, at an anticipated rate of 17% of your income without any deductions, but with generous exemptions, (a family of four, as an example, would have upwards of $40-50,000 in income before taxes would apply), whichever is best for you. But you decide, just like in Brownback’s Social Security solution: stay in the current pay-as-you-go System, or choose to have your own account with real mutual fund-like assets you will own and can leave to your loved ones.
3. Which is a more egregious tax on the American public: the AMT or the federal estate tax?
The Alternative Minimum Tax, (AMT), is a tax which, based on inflation alone, will soon represent a tax increase every year, without any act of Congress. And by 2008 it is estimated that 23 million American tax-payers will have deductions, such as their home mortgage interest expense, disallowed under the AMT. Additionally, the federal and state estate taxes are like paying to play golf your entire life, and then having the government look at your total score when you die and charging you another enormous greens fee. It makes no sense and causes lots of problems within families, especially when there are businesses that should not be sold, like farms, but the AMT is the worse threat of the two, currently.
4. It has been suggested that the IRS should be eliminated. Do you believe that this makes sense, and if you do, what would you establish in its place?
We will probably need some form of IRS as long as we have a government. But if we offer Americans a choice of filing with all their current deductions, or with the alternative flat-tax Senator Brownback is proposing, then we will have the best of both worlds: a shrinking and less corrupt IRS, and the growth and wealth that variations of flat-taxation have proven over and over again to deliver all over the world, (Hong Kong since WWII, and now all the Eastern European countries, Ireland and Iceland, too).
5. Do you think that significant tax cuts are possible considering the current state of the economy, specifically the escalating cost of the war in Iraq?
Do you like to get a discount when you buy your clothes, groceries, or a new car? If you do then you probably love the discounts the Bush Administration put in place in 2003: the same amount of government for a lower price tax-wise. The war in Iraq and its costs are peanuts compared to the hills we have to climb with our unfunded liabilities in Social Security, ($12 trillion, est.), and Medicare, (at least $40 trillion, and climbing). If you think of the countries of the world as stores instead of nations, then you would want to be Lowe’s, Home Depot, Costco or Wal-Mart, because they have discounted and allowed their customers to keep more of their money, but they have prospered, too. And that’s what all the countries cited in your previous question have done: “discounted” their taxes and the cost of government through a simple flat-tax that allows tax-payers to keep more of their money. And the economies grow because the lower prices/taxes attract more customers/tax-payers, (“tax-payers” means “productive people”).
6. And just for fun, if Uncle Sam handed you a huge refund check right now, what would you do with it?
If you have any funds you can put to work for the long-term, put them in the stock market in a well diversified portfolio of dividend paying shares. The world’s population is expected to double again in the next 70-80 years and technology is expected to advance as much in the next 30 years has it has in the past 200 years. So as long as population rises and demand for everything is increasing, good businesses will be worth owning. And as long as technology is advancing, good managers will use it to maintain their margins, or improve their profits making the market something like a guaranteed lottery built for you to win. And with Sam Brownback’s rewarding Social Security reform, younger Americans can tap into that wealth building potential with a portion of their own money while making certain seniors get their benefits on time and in full without delays or tax increases.
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Thanks, Senator!
For more information on Senator Brownback’s policies, visit his website.
