No I am not - the poster explicitly cited confiscatory taxes and redistribution as his proposed solution to the perceived problems. I don't care about what grows on the outside of his head, but on the inside it's exactly as I described, I didn't invent it - he told it himself by his own words (all while he did strawman the political opponents by falsely claiming Republicans did not oppose raising his taxes, which many of them did).
The person you replied to didn't mention taxes except as a metaphor 'tax yourself', talking about tipping well.
The rush to portray anybody to the economic left of Ayn Rand as a communist is the reason we won't see reasonable tax reform cleaning up deductions and all that, something that both Obama and Republicans say they support. The second Obama proposes something, it's communism, and there's no possibility for working with him.
The commenter did. I, however, highlighted the difference in his (commenters) approach with the approach of the author of the topic article, who advocates confiscatory taxes - because he's not content with doing something he thinks is right, he wants everybody to be forced to do the same.
As it often happens, first thing you do protesting stigmatization is stigmatize and paint me, protesting confiscatory taxes, as somebody who rushes "to portray anybody to the economic left of Ayn Rand as a communist" - despite the fact that I never said or implied anything of the sort.
The reason, however, why we don't see reasonable tax reform is, first, that current situation is hugely profitable for people in power - if you have power to grant tax exemptions, you will soon have a lot of friends who need tax exemptions, and these people tend to have a lot of money. If you make tax code simple and logical, you lose the power to regulate people's behavior (see how it comes back to where we started?) and you lose the influence and the friends with money. That's why we have hundreds of "deductions", "credits", etc. - because the government wants to control people, and when it can't do it by force of direct coercion, it does it by force of taxation. See the recent example of Obamacare - the fix to mandate the participation in the scheme is to do it through punitive taxation.
The second reason why we don't see reasonable tax reform is that for certain part of US political spectrum, "reasonable" means applying punitive and confiscatory tax levels on people that they do not like. You can not approach reasonable solution if you come in with hidden agenda and try to enact social-engineering agenda under the guise of economic policy.
The third reason why we don't see reasonable tax reform is that many view "tax reform" as a magic bullet that would allow us to get a free ride out of over-commitment on welfare obligations that our economy is unable to support. There's a widespread view that there's a huge amounts of "wealth" hidden by capitalists somewhere and if only we could tap into that hidden treasure all nearly broke welfare programs would suddenly become viable and sustainable in the long term. Unfortunately, this magic stash does not exist and tax reform would not fix the problem of welfare overcommitment.
>>>> The second Obama proposes something, it's communism, and there's no possibility for working with him.
This is pure organic bullshit. The problem with so many Obama proposals it's not that it is "communism" but that it stems from misguided idea that the economy needs more government-driven redistribution and that such redistribution makes everybody better off. Communists shared that idea too, but the problem is not in the communists, nobody cares too much what they think as they are largely irrelevant by now, the problem is that the idea is wrong.
