Republicans often joke that if election day was Apr. 15, they’d never lose an election. But while you can’t move election day, you can move tax day. And in an era when Democrats are doing everything they can to set the election system up so that they will have an advantage, early voting, mail-in voting, no ID voting, etc. and justifying it as wanting everyone to vote, moving tax day to Oct. 15 gives the GOP the perfect response: a bigger electorate is a good thing, but a well informed electorate is also a good thing. So why not have voters vote when what they paid in taxes is fresh in their minds? Even better, eliminate withholding. Reagan opposed withholding because he felt that taxes should hurt. Withholding is a way of taking advantage of people’s expectations: after awhile, they don’t really miss the money. But if everyone had a big tax bill to pay on Oct. 15, that might focus some minds.
I realize this post will probably draw quite a bit of snark, and that’s okay. But what I really want to know is why this might be an impractical or bad idea.
The notion that the GOP is somehow “good” with money is an utter joke, and anybody that believes that has less than two neurons wired and firing together. The GOP and their supporters suffer from a delusion that they understand the economy and business. In fact they are not qualified to run even a lemonade stand sourcing ingredients from a rubber garden hose and tang. If you examine what kind of people found new companies, develop new technology and expand the reach of science and cement our country’s economic position as number one in the world you will see that it is a young person’s game. Old farts need not apply and their uninformed and delapidated ideas.
The voting age should be restricted to be between 18 and 55. Anybody over that age tampers with our country’s ability to move forward and remain number one and they’re contaminating the political process with their Alzheimer’s and dementia, just like teenagers would get their zits all over the voting forms. So, I recommend that you go educate yourself. I can lend you a dollar so you can buy a vowel.
Because having one’s primary political goal as the avoidance of taxation is not good policy on which to run acountry.
There’s also some potential for backfire. People often overestimate their withholdings and then (stupidly) view their tax refund as a lucky windfall. People dread tax day because of the paperwork hassle, not because they realize on that day that taxation exists.
That would also put tax day at close to the same time as the end of the fiscal year. Which might seem logical at first blush, but those are the two busiest times of year for accountants. Put them together, and you’ll have them even more swamped then, and even more idle the rest of the year.
Generally, people don’t pay their taxes on tax day. They (usually over-) pay their taxes throughout the year, and on or near tax day get some of that back. So having election day near tax day is just as likely to bring to mind thoughts of fancy tax deductions, rather than how much tax people paid.
Well, thankfully adaher has also proposed eliminating withholding so there are no more refunds, just a lump sum bill. (Which is obviously impractical, at least if one considers the efficient collection of revenue to be a good thing, but it would probably be required to make this work the right way.)
We’ve lived without it before. Withholding didn’t start until WWII, and the state of California didn’t institute withholding for their income tax until after Reagan left office. In the case of WWII, it had less to do with making revenue collection efficient than timely. They also required tax payments to be quarterly. Cash flow was a necessity for obvious reasons. In california, efficiency and timeliness were no more a problem than they are now. California legislators just wanted to raise taxes and withholding was a way to make it less noticeable. Reagan naturally opposed it.
I’d also note that property taxes are for many taxpayers as big as their income tax bill(bigger if they have little or not income tax liability), but we don’t withhold that. People can receive a large tax bill and pay it and it doesn’t impact the efficiency of revenue collection much.
Ending withholding just isn’t going to happen. In adaher’s alternate reality, each of us would write big checks to the IRS just before the election while muttering “damn Democrats” and then turn out in droves to vote for God’s Only Party. Of course the flaw in this ointment would be that if Republicans were to somehow control all three branches of government, and people had to take out loans to pay their tax bills in October, why on earth would they still be saying “damn Democrats” and continue to vote Republican?
For many Republicans, allowing people to vote without hassles or hitches is helping the Democrats. And surprisingly, most of them have no shame about feeling this way.
So the Democrats are trying to set up the election system so more people vote? And the Republicans oppose these ideas and want fewer people to vote?
Maybe it’s time for the Republican party to stop looking for gimmicks (like moving election days or redrawing districts or redesigning ballots or programming voting machines or filing lawsuits or appointing judges or figuring out ways to stop people from voting) and address the real problem which is that more people want to vote for Democrats than Republicans. Stop trying to fix the election system and start working on fixing the Republican party. Become a political party that the majority of people want to vote for and the Republicans won’t need to come up with all these schemes to get elected.
Those “hassles” ensure the integrity of the system. While it’s true there isn’t much voter fraud amenable to fixing with ID, absentee voting and same day registration are fraud magnets.
A fiscal year can be any rolling 12 month period. For most local governments in CA - the fiscal year end is June 30. For the feds, it’s 9/30. Private businesses can set their fiscal years to whatever they want (within guidelines).
I take it you didn’t actually read your cite. It actually concludes there was very little fraud, just a bunch of paperwork screw-ups and some voter confusion, and that some policies should be changed. Even in the “double vote” cases, every one ends with “there is no evidence the voter actually voted twice.”
Further, I took your advice (but I used Bing, so there!), and only three people actually convicted for absentee ballot fraud show up in the first page of hits across the entire country. In fact, virtually all of the hits are some form of “the number of fraud convictions are so low as to clearly be a manufactured reason for voter ID laws” variety.
