Tax reform proposals to be secret for 50 years

CNNMoney.com ^ | July 25, 2013 | NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

[liberalh8ter]

Imagine being hired by a corporation to do a job and once in your position, everything you do is legally kept secret from your employer until long after you retire.

It would never fly in the real world and it shouldn't fly on Capital Hill.

[OneWingedShark]

If you think of yourself so highly that you hold ‘your amendment’ to be ‘good’ in the face of zero support, and that zero support by others must be because they do not recognize your ‘good’ amendment, then you are delusional.

I didn't say that; I said that 'support' is not necessarily indicative of 'good'.
As a real-life example consider the C-style languages; they are incredibly popular, yet suffer from easily avoidable pitfalls:

1. Dangling-else
   Does if a then if b then s else s2 mean if a then (if b then s) else s2 or if a then (if b then s else s2)?
   It's a completely avoidable problem, by simply requiring an end-if token.
2. Assignment operator
   In all of the rest of life A = 1 is an assertion that A really is 1; in C-style languages this means 1 is assigned to a (and that value returned)
3. if statement conditional check.
   In C and C++ the if statement operates on an integer, namely it is selected if the value is non-zero and not-selected otherwise (meaning it will take an else-branch, if present).
4. The previous two points combine to allow this monstrosity:
   

   if (a = 1)

   this will always assign 1 to a, and then select the if-statement (because 1 is non-zero). This is really insidious and can cause even very experienced C/C++ programmers to spend hours hunting for the bug.
5. Array-accessing
   C, C++, & PHP all do not check bounds of arrays, this is the main source of buffer overrun errors (a security concern). There are numerous languages which will check the bounds, some that can do enough analysis to remove the run-time check altogether.

These are simple things that can be completely avoided, sometimes in the design of the language's syntax!
Yet despite being not-good, C-style languages are still popular.

The FairTax is not going to get 100% following but it has a large and growing following of people that are not delusional and can see the myriad benefits and advantages of the FairTax.

Ok.

The FairTax is not complex, the Rebate is not complex. The legislation is only 133 pages long. It is amazingly simple in its design and it is by far the most fair and most supported tax reform in the nation today.

I said that it was too complex for what needed to be done: look at my proposal: less than a single page! How's that for amazingly simple?

The Flat tax has about 6 sponsors to the FairTax’s 55. Those sponsors have staffs and constituents with professional training in law, taxation and business. They are capable of understanding how important the FairTax is.

And I, for one, am not convinced. I believe it to be unnecessarily complex.

[OneWingedShark]

For example, your amendment cannot coexist with the 16th Amendment. You would have to first repeal the 16th Amendment.

Why is that? Can't an amendment modify other amendments? If not, then explain how the 21st modified (by repealing) the 18th.

In short, your amendment looks like an amateur’s exercise in making a list of rants look like some sort of edict.

Why thank you; I am an amateur when it comes to law. In fact, I suspect that I could not become a [successful] lawyer precisely because I am a constitutionalist and tend to argue from the Constitution. (Such things are, apparently, a no-no in today's case-law driven jurisprudence.)

I’ll tell you what, get just 2 members of Congress to sponsor your amendment, and I will reconsider my judgement that your amendment is rubbish.

Ok; I just might send `em off.
Oh, wait, I forgot they're no-longer impacted by physical-mail.
How about calling them?
There's not significant evidence that their staff would forward the idea on.

So, how would you recommend getting their ear in the matter?
Or are you trying to foist the impossible task on me? (I suspect you already know how insulated congressmen are, especially to those not in their districts.)

[Sequoyah101]

Who are these cowardly bastards?

One of the other things that pisses me off about the sobs is that they hide behind their constituency by not allowing you to write them if you are not in their state or district under the guise that they “don’t represent all of us”.

Heck, they don’t even represent their constituents. They represent themselves.