My "Rights" Seem Pretty Pitiful
Well, we libertarians must be losing the battle, if these are all the rights I have left as a taxpayer:
Today at 10am the Republican Study Committee will
introduce a Tax Payers Bill of Rights with the aim of getting
bi-partisan support for the principles of such a bill of rights and
incorporating them in future legislation. The principles are:1 Taxpayers have a right to have a federal government that does not grow beyond their ability to pay for it.
2 Taxpayers have a right to receive back each dollar that they entrust to the government for their retirement.
3 Taxpayers have a right to expect the government to balance the budget without having their taxes raised.
4 Taxpayers have a right to a simple, fair tax code that they can understand.
This is pretty thin soup, particularly from the party that once hailed itself as the party of small government. I can't really disagree any of this stuff, but it really constitutes a low bar, and it is even scarier that this will probably be controversial. In particular, #2 is a joke. Getting all your principal back from forty year old retirement investments basically means that all your retirement income was invested by the government at a 0% rate of return. Unfortunately, as I ran the numbers a while back, a 0% rate of return would actually be an improvement for Social Security.
This is really, really pathetic.
It's pathetic, but it's better than either party has offered in reality since Reagan retired...