Coyote Blog

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.