“Insanity is
doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” Albert Einstein
“When you
change the way you look at a thing, the thing you look at changes.” Raymond Farrar
“When you
fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise complete power over the
federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to
exist.” Charley Reese
Our Nation faces serious challenges.
Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton
University, regularly contributes to CNN.com’s opinion pages. His opinion column for May 25, 2013, was
titled, “Fix our tax headaches.”
Regarding the recent IRS tax scandal he stated, “While investigations to
determine whether laws were violated and who should be blamed are important, it
is crucial that Congress use the moments of opportunity to reform processes and
laws that are broken.”*
This sounds like a call to action.
But………
In the column Zelizer provides a history of some reforms that were
legislated as a result of previous scandals.
However, as he states:
Tax reform is always
extraordinarily difficult to accomplish, even though the issue draws support from
liberals who seek to create a fairer system and conservatives who want a more
efficient system. The problem is that
the status quo is powerful.
Zelizer explains why the status quo is powerful: “There are vested
interests, both organizations with financial power and bureaucrats, who don’t
want anything to change.” Those
interests and bureaucrats will fight to maintain the status quo. But, vested interests and bureaucrats don’t
pass laws.
Charley
Reese (please see the post immediately below) provided
the following:
Have you ever wondered why, if
both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have
deficits? Have you ever wondered why, if
all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes we have inflation and
high taxes?
That can be changed to read, “Have you ever wondered why, if Democrats
want a fairer tax system and Republicans want a more efficient tax system, we
don’t have a fairer and more efficient tax system? Zelizer provides an interesting insight: “Scandals
such as these have the potential to change the equation, by creating political
pressure on elected officials to do something to the system upon which they
thrive.” In other words, if there is no
political pressure, there is no incentive for our elected officials to “do
something to the system upon which they thrive.”
Above I provide Charley Reese’s comment: “When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545
people exercise complete power over the federal government, then it must follow
that what exists is what they want to exist.”
He also wrote:
There are no insoluble
government problems. Do not let these
545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they
can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to
regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from which they can
take it.
Zelizer states, “The more government can do to create the impression that
the system is working well, the more confidence we can gain in our government
on the right and the left.” Do we want
to base our confidence in government on a created impression, or do we want our
confidence to be based on results? As
Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used
when we created them.”
* Zelizer, Julian. “Fix our tax
headaches.” CNN.com. May 28,2013.
Retrieved from:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/28/opinion/zelizer-tax-reform/index.html?hpt=op_r1 
