Signal Intelligence About The LP

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Sunday, May 3, 2020

Replace 140M Federal Taxpayers With 50

Earnest but moderate LP presidential candidates like Gary Johnson and Jim Gray get themselves into trouble with "hardcore" Libertarians when they advocate policies like the Fair Tax or a negative income tax. These earnest candidates get trapped into specifying exactly how they would raise the trillions in revenue that the unconstitutional federal leviathan currently demands. Instead, they should advocate that in these United States of North America there should be only 50 federal taxpayers: the states themselves.

That's how it was originally specified in the Articles of Confederation: all federal revenue had to be supplied by the several states, and each state could decide how to raise its share of the revenue. With this policy, the POTUS candidate doesn't have to defend a particular tax scheme that states might use. Instead, states would compete on tax policy, and competition would quickly show which scheme was least bad.

The same applies for social insurance policies like the negative income tax, Social Security, and Medicare. There is no state in the union that is so poor that it cannot provide for its own poor. For federal social insurance programs, just divide the assets of their trust funds among the states. (The formula could be by population, by past total contributions, by estimated future liability, or some combination of these. Treat this as a bankruptcy, because that's what it is.)

The first Libertarian POTUS should not feel obligated to advocate even a temporary continuation of the unconstitutional federal nanny state and the federal payroll taxes that finance it. Instead, divide and conquer the federal leviathan, and make each state own its share of the problem. When a Libertarian is in the White House, the District of Columbia should stop being the place where tax and income policy is dictated to 140 million taxpayers. Replace them all with just 50, and de-power D.C.

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