I first noticed this tendency last year, when Edwards acknowledged the problems with public schools, and then promoted this solution: Do nothing about public schools, but give poor people “housing vouchers” so they can move to wealthier neighborhoods with better public schools.
It was an approach I likened to finding out that the H.M.S. Titanic would inevitably strike an iceberg and had far too few lifeboats on board, and then recommending lifeboat vouchers to poor people in steerage. Just grant the fixable problems as the givens in an equation, and then try to find a solution. It’s a treat-the-symptoms-only approach.
Well, he’s done it again. This time the problem he’s not going to try to solve is the country’s byzantine income-tax system. The symptoms he wants to treat are more “Lifeboat Vouchers to Steerage” petty class-warfare politicking. He wants to — get this — have the IRS do the income taxes for poor people (which would also greatly expand the IRS workload and create a need for higher taxes). The Charlotte Observer reports:
In a podcast the campaign will post on its Web site today, Edwards says the U.S. tax code is unnecessarily complicated and full of loopholes that favor the wealthy over the working class.
Under his plan, the IRS would gather tax information for 50 million Americans with relatively simple returns. The IRS would calculate their tax bill or refund, and mail a final report to the taxpayer, who would be able to just sign and return the form. Edwards’ campaign estimates it would save taxpayers about 225 million hours annually.
The IRS already collects basic tax information for audit purposes, but Edwards questioned why the service makes taxpayers spend days “gathering their information, hunched over tax forms and tax tables and calculator trying to figure it all out, just to tell the IRS the information it already has.”
