Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [91]
“The longer I stay in Washington,” reporter Jeff Birnbaum writes, “the more I believe the protection-money racket is a good metaphor for what a lot of campaign giving is about.”16 A protection racket, or a gift economy—you pick, but each of which depends upon the other side’s having something to give. And the key for reformers on the Right to see is that the more the government’s fingers are in your business, the more the politicians have to “give.” “Donors coerce politicians,” as Clawson puts it, “and politicians coerce donors.”17
The same dynamic explains the organization of Congress. Newt Gingrich “believed that the more committees and subcommittees a person can be on, the more attractions they can acquire to present to contributors.”18 Of course, as I’ve already reported, the attendance at hearings of those committees has also fallen off dramatically. But that’s consistent with an account of the growth of committees that looks more to the influence of committee membership on potential funders than to the importance of the actual work of the committees. As Martin Schram reported after interviewing former members of Congress, “lawmakers freely acknowledged that they and their colleagues often sought assignments to certain ‘cash cow’ committees primarily because members of those committees are able to raise large amounts of campaign money with little effort.”19 Here is the purest example of regulating to raise money, open and notorious in the current context of Congress.
The lesson is simple: Getting a smaller government is difficult enough. Getting a smaller government when members have a direct financial interest in a bigger one might well be impossible.
2. Simple Taxes
It has been a central plank of the Republican Party since before Ronald Reagan that our system taxes too much, and too complexly. Simpler, “lower taxes” has been the common and consistent refrain. Of course, sometimes that refrain has been translated into lower taxes, at least for some. But the aspirations of many on the Right (and sometimes even on the Left, such as Jerry Brown in the 1992 presidential election) that we move to a flat tax, so simple it could be completed on a postcard, have not been realized.
Why? Who benefits from complex taxes? And how could that benefit possibly outweigh a universal push for simplicity?
To understand the nature of tax law in America, you have to understand one simple point: its complexity is a feature, not a bug. From the perspective of those closest to crafting the code, complexity offers a host of opportunities that simplicity simply can’t. Some of those opportunities are legitimate: the chance to better target taxing to achieve economic goals. But many are completely illegitimate. And for the illegitimate, when simplicity is pushed, complexity pushes back harder.
The most obvious, if most trivial, example of this is the very system for collecting taxes. In 2005 the State of California started experimenting with a system they called “ReadyReturn.” The ReadyReturn system treated taxes the way Visa treats your credit card bill. Rather than demanding that you fill out a form listing all the times you used your Visa over the prior month, and then sending a check to Visa for the total, Visa sends you a bill that lists all the charges you made, and the amount Visa thinks you owe it. Of course you’re free to challenge any charge on the bill. Credit card companies are pretty good about removing them. But obviously, given that Visa knows every charge you’ve made, it makes more sense for them to fill out your bill than for you.
Advocates for the ReadyReturn asked, Why aren’t taxes the same? For the vast majority