Robin Burk is accredited to this year's Conservative Political Action Conference as a member of the Winds of Change.NET team. She's covering CPAC as a private citizen and maybe a "citizen journalist" (if she could figure out what that means), as an academic studying new media trends, and as an ordinary voter interested in national & international affairs. Robin is not affiliated with the organizations who sponsor CPAC.
Most people agree that our tax code is a mess - it's huge, full of arcane provisions and held together with bubblegum and duct tape. But what to put in its place?
I missed Grover Norquist and Lew Uhler on this panel. I did catch Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation. In keeping with his group's focus on detailed analysis (check out their site), Hodge listed country after country whose tax codes are becoming more business-friendly than ours in the U.S.
Money quote: I'll tell you the difference between Old Europe and New Europe. In Old Europe the big star is Jerry Lewis. In New Europe the big star is Steve Forbes.
The panel finished up with Herman Cain, Black businessman and founder of A New Voice Foundation. His talk brought the rhythms of Gospel preaching to a call for tax rewrite (he thinks the current code is beyond reforming and needs to be redone from the ground up). I can see how Cain was able to take over as CEO of Godfather Pizza and turn the company around. To quote Bryan Preston of Junkyardblog, who's sitting next to me in Bloggers Row, Cain smoked!
>>Whose Money is It, Anyway?
It's mine.
Filthy lying thieves.
As for tax reform, there's simply no clean way to extract 2.5 trillion dollars from the US economy.
10%. That's all we need in our tax code. It's simple, it's flat, and if it's good enough for God, why the HELL isn't it good enough for the government? Does the government think it's more important?
For those who might not be familiar with the practice, many Christians give a tithe of 10% to their church or to charities. The last time I saw statistics on this, lower income Christians contributed in greater numbers than upper income ones.