Saying the tax code is a complex web that caters to the connected, that the 16th amendment violates constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure and that the IRS cannot be trusted to deal honestly with the American people, Oklahoma Rep. Jim Bridenstine says it’s time to repeal the amendment legalizing a federal income tax and abolish the IRS.
Bridenstine filed the proposed constitutional amendment on Monday, saying that this year’s scandal exposing IRS harassment of conservative organizations is just the latest proof that the current tax system needs to be scrapped. Especially galling to Bridenstine is President Obama’s insistence that the problem was limited to a couple of rogue staffers in the Cincinnati office.
“That’s not true. We now know that by direction these ‘insensitive agents’ were sending the packages to Washington, D.C. Once these applications got to Washington they were sent upstairs to the office of the chief counsel of the IRS, which is one of two Barack Obama appointees in the IRS,” said Bridenstine. “The idea that the IRS is being used as a political weapon has got people in my district just outraged.”
The proposed repeal amendment is pretty straightforward.
“We just want to repeal the 16th amendment and eliminate the IRS. This amendment gives us a two-year window to come up with an alternative form of revenue,” he said.
Bridenstine says the proposed amendment does not dictate any specific replacement for the income tax, although he sees it coming down to a debate between the fair tax, would would essentially be a consumption tax and the flat tax, which assesses a simple percentage tax rate across the board. The congressman personally prefers the fair tax because no federal tax agency would be required to make sure revenues are collected.
In addition to likening the personal information the IRS gathers from Americans to unreasonable search and seizure forbidden in the Fourth Amendment, Bridenstine sees several other reasons why the income tax needs to go.
First on that list is the bureaucratic maze that requires many people to spend time and money to assure they are in compliance with federal law. The congressman cited a Mercatus Center report showing that Americans spend one trillion dollars per year in tax costs outside of what they pay into the U.S. Treasury. The same report shows six billion man hours are spent each year on tax preparation.
“That’s the same as a full-time workforce of 3.4 million people for a whole year, and 3.4 million people is larger than the city of Chicago, larger than the city of Chicago. It’s larger than the city of Houston and it’s larger than the city of Philadelphia. This is a huge drain,” he said.
Another frustration for Bridenstine and his allies is how the tax code is structured to benefit the well-connected at the expense of the American people.
“From 2001-2010, there were 4,428 changes to the internal revenue code. That’s more than one change per day,” said Bridenstine. “The only people who are getting what they want in the tax code are lobbyists, who spend all their time coming and talking to me as a member of Congress, saying why their client is so important and we’ve got to change the tax code for this purpose.
“The reality is that people that are listening to this broadcast, in many cases they don’t have a lobbyist. They just have a member of Congress. And their member of Congress is turning over our tax policy to the lobbyists. It’s disadvantaging some people and advantaging others,” he said.
Several members of Congress have championed tax reform to simplify the system and eliminate massive special interest loopholes. Bridenstine isn’t buying that as a sincere effort, noting that as long as politicians need to be re-elected they will be giving special favors through the tax code.
Passing a constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate and ratification by three-fourths of the states. While admitting it’s an uphill climb, Bridenstine says political winds can shift quickly, noting that no one expected passage of something like Obamacare just a few years before circumstances handed Democrats the White House and large majorities in the House and Senate.
While on the subject of Obamacare, Bridenstine also explained his vote against the “Keep Your Health Plan Act” on Friday. The bill passed easily, but Bridenstine was one of four GOP members to oppose it.
“We were going to pass a law that takes the president’s law and it puts it on our shoulders, so that we are promising that if you like your health care you can keep it. The insurance companies cannot change these actuarial tables on a dime, which means in the coming days people are still going to lose their health care policies,” said Bridenstine.
“The last thing I want is Republicans owning that lie, because we can’t keep that promise any more than the president,” he said.
