Let’s assume that Ron Paul becomes President in 2012, or some other libertarian who wants to end the income tax. We were talking about this on the forums in the past, and I believe someone said that he couldn’t issue an executive order to demolish all taxes because he’d be impeached for not providing government agencies with money, etc.
Clearly he wouldn’t want to get impeached. Would it be easier for him to change the tax-code so that it would basically be a loop-hole for every single company to become a non-profit, or would that be even more difficult? It’d be a loop-hole for the companies and then for the President himself, too. The companies wouldn’t have to pay the income tax, property tax, and maybe payroll tax, which would mean no more welfare state, and then the President couldn’t get impeached.
Would this work? I’m not sure how exactly the tax-code and such works, so this might be a ton more work than I expect, but it was just an idea I had.
Well, the 16th Amendment doesn’t have to be repealed in order for there to be no income tax. It’s really up to Congress.
He could push Congress to put those kinds of loopholes in tax legislation. However, I also believe that he favors the fairtax over any kind of income tax, so there really aren’t any loopholes with a fairtax.
Ideally, we would go back to the Articles of Confederation or non-protective tariffs only, at the very least.
In all honesty, taxes don’t matter too much. If you tax the rich, they’ll pass costs onto the poor. If you tax the poor, the rich will have to pay them higher wages and charge lower prices… Its all about where the money gets spent… what it crowds out. Etc. I don’t see why Ron Paul couldn’t cut a ton of budgets and then just implement tax credits. In fact, he could at least implement a 100% tax credit for every american in order to abolish the income tax…
While I have great respect for Ron Paul, I think chances would be high that, if he were elected President and thus tried to carry out his agenda, he would be impeached by Congress.
I don’t think this would necessarily be a bad thing. Bill Clinton was pretty unpopular, then he got impeached, and a national conversation ensued over the prudence in impeaching a President “just for sex” (I realize he also committed perjury, but that was often forgotten by the masses.) As a result of the sympathy he engendered over the affair (and the swelling dot.com bubble), his popularity soared to levels higher than it had ever been. If Ron Paul’s impeachment results in an analagous (and yet far more important) national conversation about the wisdom of impeaching a President for “cutting spending”, it will be a trememdous opportunity to further the debate for liberty, and will cast Paul and his agenda as sympathetic figures. If, in the face of public opposition, Congress went through with removal, it would expose the government’s true agenda more clearly than any argument or any legislation.
You bring up good points, of course. Clinton’s ability to overcome his impeachment was due to successfully spinning the issue (in the eyes of most US citizens) into an invasion of privacy. The real reason he was impeached was due to committing perjury.
So the impetus would be on Congress to spin things into Paul trying to sabotage “the American way of life” or similar nonsense. That doesn’t necessarily mean people won’t believe it, of course.