Think your taxes are too low? Protest by making them lower!

Dec 30, 2010
WSJ

By JAMES TARANTO

We’d like to offer a last-minute nomination for the nitwittiest idea of the year: GiveItBackForJobs.com. This is the cognitive elite’s version of a tax revolt, made all the more comical because it is the product of two of America’s top universities. (They are Yale and Cornell, so that our Harvard readers have reason to feel even smugger than usual today.)

When normal people stage a tax revolt, it is because taxes are too high. These geniuses are upset that taxes are too low. Like President Obama, they were hoping for a big tax increase this weekend, as stipulated in the 2001 and ’03 tax laws. But Congress acted to avert it, and Obama signed the legislation keeping income-tax rates the same, at least for the next two years.

“Quite possibly, the President had no good alternative,” opine the patient pedagogues. “But we citizens need not abandon ourselves to this failure of government. Instead, ordinary Americans, acting together, can create shadow fiscal policy. . . . Americans who have the means should refuse to surrender to Senate Republicans.”

These profs–Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker and law scholars Robert Hockett of Cornell and Daniel Markovits of Yale–are obviously left-wing progressive Democrats. They even reprise Obama’s long-forgotten dopey campaign slogan “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Yet in equating ordinary Americans” with “Americans who have the means,” they make clear that unlike Obama, also an affluent prog, they make no pretense that “the wealthy” are their class enemies. Good for them.

So, how do they propose that you protest the absence of a tax increase? The first step is to enter your filing status and your best guess as to your 2011 adjusted gross income into a calculator on the homepage, which will “calculate the magnitude of your tax cut.” (By “tax cut,” they mean the tax increase that was averted.) The number is calculated to the cent, a level of precision that is utterly false. You won’t actually know your adjusted gross income until you’ve finished the first page of your 2011 tax return, in 2012; and your taxable income varies further depending on deductions and exemptions.

Still, you have a very rough estimate of how much your taxes won’t go up as a result of the legislation enacted earlier this month. You then “give back” the money by writing a check to the U.S. Treasury and sending it to the address on this Web page that explains how to make gifts to the federal government. Voilà, you’ve effectively raised your own taxes.

Haha, just kidding. They don’t want you to give your money to the government. Instead, they want you to “give back . . . by making donations to organizations that promote fairness, economic growth, and a vibrant middle class.” They suggest Habitat for Humanity, the Salvation Army, the Children’s Aid Society and the Nurse Family Partnership, but you can choose another charity if you like.

One advantage of this approach, as the professors note, is that “contributions to all of the selected charities are tax deductible.” That means “donations made through this site draft the government as a partner in funding the projects that they support.”

To translate that obfuscatory verbiage into plain English, if you follow the professors’ method of protesting your low tax bill, you will lower your tax bill even further. Talk about a win-win!

And that only begins to capture the brilliance of this idea. By giving your money to charity instead of the government, they explain, you “replicate good government policy, outside the government and free from the grip of obstructionists within it.”

Come to think of it, we’re being too hard on these guys. They’ve made a profound discovery: Private, voluntary charity is far more effective than coercive federal bureaucracies at helping people in need. To be sure, this is common sense. But you don’t get tenure at Yale or Cornell by being common. Given the intellectual handicaps under which Hacker, Hockett and Markovits operate, they can be very proud to have figured this out.

Read more at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703909904576051572334343448.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

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