Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [74]
I pointed out in my budget speech that all of these services we buy—like haircuts, car washes, piano tuning, boat docking, dating, on and on—go mostly untaxed. Some cases in point, in terms of winners and losers: If you get a haircut in Minnesota, it’s not taxed. If your dog gets one, it is. Whether the hair comes off a human or a dog should be irrelevant. If you board your horse, it’s not taxed. If you board your dog, it is. This clearly shows me that the dogs have bad lobbyists. If you hire a company to plant a tree, it’s not taxed. If they cut a tree down, it is. I imagine landscaping people do both, don’t you?
These were the kind of reforms I’d promised people during my campaign, and mine have since been described as “perhaps the boldest, most far-reaching proposals for changing the state’s tax system in Minnesota history.” So what happened? The 2001 regular session ended with every single piece of tax and spending legislation left hanging. The House wanted more of the property-tax relief set aside for businesses. The Senate wanted more for homeowners. It was gridlock, and I had to order a special session and threaten a government shutdown.
I told people on my weekly radio show that if that happened, “there would be no state troopers out on the roads. There would be no prison guards. So we’ve come up with an idea called ‘Host a Convict.’ We’re going to look for legislators and people that would like to volunteer to take a few convicts into their homes during the shutdown.”
On June 30, at 3:30 in the morning—right up against the deadline—the legislature acted. Historic property-tax reform and relief passed. Education funding came off the local property tax rolls and went into the state’s general fund. My plan to broaden the sales tax didn’t make it, but I wasn’t giving up yet. I still had a year to go in my first term.
Running into the fellow from Minnesota at the casa de cambio gets Terry and me talking that night in the hotel room about taxes. I’ve been audited twice. Two years in a row, in fact, when I was mayor of Brooklyn Park, even though the IRS claims that never happens to people. I hadn’t cheated on my taxes. The second year, they even found a mistake in my favor. But all that did was pay for two years of my accountant’s bills.
“They went so far as to make me categorize how much shampoo I used,” Terry remembers.
“And they wanted to know how much money I carried in my wallet on a day-by-day basis,” I recall. “That’s not an invasion of my privacy? If I want to carry around ten grand, as long as I’ve paid my fair share to the government, it’s none of their business!”
“Your mother lived with us then, and they wanted to know whether there was any chance she’d hidden some money in our backyard. It was ridiculous!”
“I was going crazy, but fortunately my accountant kept me away from them.”
“The second audit, they wanted to look at my horse business. But I had a business plan and was so well organized, they ended up giving me a refund.”
Summing up our frustrations—and presumably those of thousands of Americans—I say: “The IRS assumes you are guilty and forces you to either try to muddle through alone against their professionals, or hire your own expert to defend yourself, if you can afford it. They freeze people’s assets, and they threaten you with fines, taking your house and property, and sometimes even with jail. To me, this smacks of Gestapo-type tactics. So what’s the alternative? Abolishing the income tax, and putting in place a national sales tax instead.”
This would make paying taxes strictly between business and government, and you as an individual would be taken out of the mix. No more keeping seven years of tax returns stashed away in your attic. And no more being guilty until