What won't work

I was there when a former county supervisor stood up recently and, in effect, said he was totally ashamed of how Stafford’s current board has degenerated. Well, I’ve remarked myself in this space that it has been dysfunctional all along, so I’d have to agree to a degree.
And then here came the three GOP supervisors to propose something novel, you might say. Put all the board members on merit pay, or something like it. Let’s say the board’s three main objectives are realized during the year, or term. Give the supervisors all the pay they now get. But if none are, then pay them only 70 percent. Thus can success be rewarded, teamwork vindicated and failure penalized, and the foregone bonuses returned to the county treasury. Yeah.
But who will decide? Themselves? You jest. Rather, if they’re really for merit pay, let each supervisor’s district voters decide his bonus or cut in pay each year. Again, yeah.
The idea won’t work. The four non-GOP members of the board quickly buried it.
I hate to side with the majority. But you see, I speak from personal experience.
Back during my long bureaucrat stay in USDA, my division embraced the Total Quality Management scheme in support of Al Gore’s “re-inventing government.” Thus, along about 1992, my supervisory people were awarded bonuses at the end of the year, based on how highly they had been rated. To keep the modest bonuses from being too piddling, I decided they’d go only to my top-rated supervisors, even though all had been satisfactory.
That wasn’t cool, they intimated to me later. So the following year I let them decide how to allocate their own bonus money. Sure enough, they all voted themselves inconsequential sums, nullifying the merit pay idea. My people didn’t want superior effort to be rewarded if it meant dissing a few. As a group they wanted everyone to get a little bit. How egalitarian.
Now tell me. Which of our county supervisors would vote against getting his full official pay regardless of what the board had arguably accomplished? Certainly not the majority. I’d guess they’d be like my own bureaucrats — egalitarian.
Now let’s move on to matters of real concern. Although you can’t escape all the unrelentingly dire stuff about how depressed we are, emanating from the White House, our Stafford County administrator, Anthony Romanello, has proposed a county budget that looks sensible. No layoffs and only a moderate boost in the personal property tax rate, and none others. That shouldn’t affect me much, since my car—the main taxable burden—is now over four years old. So its book decline in value may offset the rise in my personal property tax rate. I’m not sure about that, but I’ll finger no worry beads unless informed otherwise.
My big worries, like those of many others, center on the gutting of my retirement funds by the stock market’s collapse. My IRAs still list stocks and mutual funds, most of which I could cash in for a really good Happy Meal.
But things will change. They always do. At least they did, and for the better when we came out of our last recession after 1982. I recall that before then, the Administration had done something entirely symbolic, and Keynesian, in changing the title of an esteemed Commerce Department. monthly statistical report, from Business Cycle Developments to something so inane I can‘t even remember it. Back then, big-shot economists thought their federal policies would smooth out our national peaks and valleys and leave us happy and, like the baby bear’s porridge, just right and non-cyclical.
Moral: Don’t believe what economists say. Or for that matter, presidents. I remember one who went around preaching for a partial privatization of Social Security. That idea bombed, luckily for us, or else our Social Security cupboard now would be as bare as our IRAs and 101(K)s (formerly 401(K)s).
And now President Obama is extending the horizon for his budget finagling to 10 years, rather than the customary five, no doubt to show we’ll someday have better times that will cut the deficits caused by his assorted trillion-dollar stimulus plans. But never mind. After all, spring is nigh. And someday soon, as sure as things keep cycling regardless, all my azaleas will again blossom. I can hardly wait.

We face a taxing future

Time does fly. The Super Bowl, the Inauguration and the stimulus law are already just a memory, and now we must focus on springtime despite its most hated feature. Hint: April 15.

Could everybody, consciously or not, cheat on income tax returns? Or at least those of us who do the 1040 long form ourselves? Seems like it. And if one runs a business, has a home office---well, we’d be in a heap of trouble if the IRS actually audited all returns instead of so few. It does seem, even so, that some of our wealthiest filers have recently been flagged as tax chiselers.

My old barbershop quartet buddy, Bob Dundas, once told me, upon learning I had never been audited, that I should claim more deductions on my returns. Bob, at the time a stockbroker and former combat jet pilot (what a combination!) said he had endured several audits and usually came out all right. I couldn‘t be so daring. I’ve even worried that Sheriff Jett might frisk me for watering my azaleas during a drought.

Besides, how can anyone avoid mistakes on that miserable Form 1040? I heard the other day that some 500 new income tax regulations had been added in just the past year.

An aggravating side note about taxes rang my own bell a few weeks ago when Stafford County demanded for the first time that I confess how much I grossed from my freelance writing last year. Why? The dastardly Stafford Board of Supervisors, you may recall, had passed a new tax on businesses (BPOL). It’s not slated to take effect until next year, but its first impact on us struggling entrepreneurs (not to mention its cost to the county) has already hit home. And guess what? It was pledged to help pay only for transportation needs, but no more.

Back to my IRS gripes: Although I’ve always played it pretty straight on my returns, I do remember more than once being creative in filling out the monstrous alternative minimum tax form. That was back when I did the returns myself, before I gave up and had them done and thus got a better night‘s sleep.

That AMT form demands a complete re-do of your 1040 return to see which calculation will cost you more. I hadn’t reached the income to require AMT’s use, but had invested in some limited partnerships that automatically triggered the requirement. What an abomination!

For those so financially fortunate they must file the AMT, I‘ll bet many of them cheat, on purpose or accidentally. And the really rich folks, as historian Victor Davis Hanson noted recently, seem not only to cheat, but to cheat until they get audited. Maybe he knows my friend Bob. Then there are the Washington lobbyists vetted for Obama administration posts, we are reminded, “who are never charged for what might well have put the rest of us in jail,” Hanson claims.

(Carl Rove, the former White House official, quipped that Obama’s new administration had become a tax haven for the rich, like those companies parked offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. Item: Feds say UBS bank hid 52,000 customer accounts offshore.)

But that’s nothing new. According to a New York Times report in 1995, Hillary Clinton and hubby Bill took improper deductions for payments on a real-estate investment. I am shocked.

Now let’s hear it for our champeen disser of Form 1040: former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry. Turns out he simply didn’t file any tax returns for many recent years. That’s audacity squared.

Back to Hanson: In arguing for a flat tax to replace the 1040, he adds that at the bottom end of the wealth scale are workers who are “paid in cash and do not pay their proper share either—as the country is ripped off by both the top and bottom ends of the spectrum.”

True? Just stop by a 7-Eleven parking lot in Woodbridge early on a Saturday morning and see for yourself.

But Hanson goes off the rails with that charge. Not to be an immigrant coddler, but I’d say most of them earn too little to owe much in income taxes and if they do file, their “earned income tax credit” costs the government more than what they owe.

Further, as Obama promises, their taxes will surely be cut. More to the point, it would be cheaper to give them a pass to begin with. But that would mean less work for IRS workers. Perish the thought; they’re part of the stimulus, after all. So crack down on those cheatin’ dishwashers.