Endless pointless rhetoric

I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to find all this electioneering talk about taxes and who paid what rather tedious.

I really don’t care how much Mitt Romney or Barack Obama paid in taxes or at what rate they paid what they owed. I assume that both are honorable men who abide by the law and that, like the rest of us, they took advantage of every loophole and legality that would allow them to pay as little as possible. Whether the laws that allow them to pay at a lower rate than those making less are fair is, at this point, a moot question.  It’s the law until the tax code is revised. 

Nor am I interested in their tax plans for the future and whether the middle class will pay 20 percent less than the upper classes or everyone will pay at the same rate regardless of their deductions or lack thereof. Both candidates can answer reasonably and honestly with specificity when it comes to taxes or plans to reduce the debt and deficit, and their responses at this point will be worth about as much as the value of the euro in Athens.

You can imagine, then, how exhilarated I was when the debate between Tim Kaine and George Allen rolled around and when Kaine proceeded to “clarify” his views on taxes in a subsequent interview with the Gazette.

I suppose my underlying problem is that I find it hard to grasp the concept of sequestration when it comes to the innards of tax talk lingo.  But there it is, nevertheless, and it evidently is doing whatever it is that it does to $1.2 trillion in spending cuts that will kick in over the next 10 years.

In order to avoid this dire occurrence, Kaine proposes to cancel the Bush tax cuts for everyone making more than $500,000 and thus, according to his reckoning, save $50 billion a year. Another $240 billion over ten years could be saved by allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs. And another $24 billion could be saved by taking away the tax exemptions now enjoyed by the five big oil companies. The amount of cuts left to be made would come to a mere $236 billion. Kaine says this is “doable.” 

Doable though it may be, I find it hard to swallow because, quite frankly, I have no idea what he’s talking about. What I do know, however, is that all of these proposals have to go through committees of both the Senate and the House of Representatives and that, given the success that Obama has had in trying to rid us of the Bush tax cuts, in reducing Medicare costs and removing money from the fists of big oil companies, doable is not the word I would have used in this case. If, after the election, one party wins the presidency and piles up large majorities in both the Senate and the House, maybe, just maybe, doable would be a possibility. But otherwise, forget it. 

What political candidates on all levels seem to forget is that lengthy discussions about economic esoterica are generally a waste of time, unless you can tell every Jim, Joe and Jane exactly how much he or she is going to be paying in taxes next year.  The rest is in the realm of the ethereal and quite divorced from the reality of political possibilities.

Rather than spending endless hours on how we’re going to save trillions by tossing billions from one pot to another, how much more compelling it would have been had Kaine and Allen spent more time on issues of urgency to Virginia localities. 

I would like to know, for instance, what evils await those officials at VDOT who decided to close both the James River Bridge and the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel at the same time for repaving. 

Maybe we should sequester the toads.