Having failed to remove President Trump from office by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the anti-Russia brouhaha, the leftist establishment is now returning to Trump’s federal income-tax returns in the hopes of accomplishing the same thing.
Even though Trump has steadfastly refused to disclose his income-tax returns, which he has every right to do, the Democrat Party-controlled House Ways and Means Committee is now attempting an end-around by demanding that the IRS deliver the tax returns to the committee. The demand, not surprisingly, is being supported by the mainstream press.
The committee’s rational for this extraordinary action? It says that it just wants to provide oversight on IRS operations. Oh, and it’s promising to keep Trump’s tax returns secret.
That, of course, is ridiculous, nothing more than a sham to finally get ahold of Trump’s income-tax returns.
The reason that many in the leftist establishment have wanted Trump’s returns from the beginning has been so that they could have an army of well-paid tax experts and tax attorneys scour the returns for evidence of “criminal” wrongdoing, which would enable Democrats to seek Trump’s from office through impeachment, the same goal they had with Mueller’s investigation.
And it is a virtual certainty that those tax experts and tax attorneys would find tax-law violations in Trump’s income-tax returns. That is precisely why the federal income tax is so complicated. There is no way that anyone, especially a high-powered multimillionaire businessman like Trump who operates complex international businesses, can avoid running afoul of the thousands of provisions in the IRS Code. The complexity is by design. It enables the federal government to go after anyone it wants any time it wants.
Of course, the same phenomenon exists with respect to the regulated or managed economy. Every CEO and bank president in America knows this, which is why virtually all of them remain silent when it comes to foreign policy and the forever wars and dark-side operations of the national-security establishment. They know that if they speak out against the wrongdoing, the feds, who are ostensibly devoted to the principles of the First Amendment, will come after them for regulatory and tax violations.
One of the best examples was QWEST CEO Joseph Nacchio, who said no when the feds approached him after the 9/11 attacks and requested that he participate in an illegal scheme that involved the compromise of his customers’ privacy. They punished him severely by targeting him with a ridiculous “insider trading” regulatory violation and sent him to prison for several years. It was a severe message that was being sent to other business executives.
That’s what they’re hoping to do with Trump by scouring his income-tax returns. In fact, it’s what they’re also still trying to do with Trump’s purported campaign-finance regulatory violations, another rich area for federal officials to mine when the need to go after someone arises. It’s also why they’re still hoping to find some regulatory or tax violation through the “cooperation” of Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen.
The Framers and our American ancestors knew that this sort of tyranny was certain to arise. That’s why they drew a distinction between “direct” and “indirect” taxation. They knew that “direct” taxes, like income taxes, would inevitably entail a direct, tyrannical assault on the liberty and privacy of the citizenry, especially with an agency like the IRS, one of the most powerful and tyrannical agencies in history. They knew that while an “indirect” tax, like a sales tax, would still have a coercive feature to it, the liberty and privacy of the citizenry would be better protected.
That’s why the American people lived without a federal income tax for some 125 years. Of course, they also lived without the massive and voracious welfare-warfare state that Americans today live under.
Imagine: Our American ancestors kept everything they earned and were free to decide the use of their own money. No mandatory charity, including Social Security and Medicare. No need to file income-tax returns. No need to rush to the Post Office on April 15. No need to keep track of their deductions. No fear of getting a letter from the IRS. No IRS.
I sometimes wonder how today’s mainstream press and leftist establishment would have survived in 19th-century America. Given their obsession with seeing-income tax returns of political candidates today, what would they have done if they had lived back then? Their lives would obviously have been empty given that there were no income-tax returns to demand disclosure of.
President Trump is smart to continue keeping his income-tax returns secret. Too bad he doesn’t go further and propose an end to the federal income tax itself. He could use the office of the presidency to show why the income tax itself and its enforcement agency, the IRS, are the perfect embodiment of evil and tyranny, along with the welfare-warfare state programs the income tax funds. He could embrace the libertarian principle that every person has the right to keep everything he earns and decide for himself what to do with it. Why, he could even point to the Articles of Confederation, the governmental system that preceded the Constitution and which lasted for 13 years, where our American ancestors made sure that the federal government didn’t have the power to tax at all, directly or indirectly.