As is their practice every four years, the masterminds at TaxCoach have prepared a side by side chart comparing the tax related campaign promises by the two main presidential candidates.   

This is for entertainment purposes only.  I’m not expecting too many people to base their election preferences on this because, as we all know, campaign promises rarely turn into reality.

In the sense of fairness, I need to remind everyone that there will be more than two choices on the November presidential ballot, which is great for those who can’t stomach voting for either Trump or Hitlery.  Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party will be on the ballot in all 50 states and may even be in the big debates if his name is included in more preference polls.  His tax policy can be found here on his campaign website.

Today’s federal tax code does all the wrong things. It penalizes productivity, savings and investment, while rewarding inefficiency and designating winners and losers according to political whim.

For far too long, tax laws have been used not just as a means to collect needed revenues, but as a way for special interests to penalize their competitors while subsidizing themselves. The result is a tax code that is more than 70,000 pages long, enforced by a government agency with almost 100,000 employees. As a result, our tax code has created a nightmare for the average American, while providing shelter for those with the means to manipulate it.

Governor Johnson advocates for the elimination of special interest tax loopholes, to get rid of the double-taxation on small businesses, and ultimately, the replacement of all income and payroll taxes with a single consumption tax that determines your tax burden by how much you spend, not how much you earn. Such a tax would be structured to insure that no one’s tax burden for the purchase of basic family necessities would be increased. To the contrary, costs of necessities would likely decrease with the elimination of taxes already included in the price of virtually everything we buy.

Many leading economists have long advocated such a shift in the way we are taxed, and Gary Johnson believes the time has come to replace our current tax code, which penalizes the savings, productivity and investment we so desperately need.

Stop special interest loopholes. Reward responsibility. And simplify our tax code.

It’s been a while since I have mentioned the benefits for tax pros of subscribing to the TaxCoach service.  It has actually become more useful every year, as they continually add new features.  The weekly call-ins among the TaxCoach members are extremely informative.  Any tax pro wanting a great reference source for tax saving ideas, as well as methods of expanding their practice should check out TaxCoach.  My two main tax reference sources for the past few years have been TaxCoach and TheTaxBook as I let my subscriptions to the many other ones lapse.