Brad Ford is the worst writer in Gordon Howie's Potemkin-village blogroll. Howie and Ed Randazzo are permanently reality-challenged, but at least I can understand their primal screams of Guns, God, and Glory. Ford can't even craft a coherent argument.
Consider this morning his latest screed, "No to Online Sales Tax." Ford starts with Reagan... which usually indicates a conservative wannabe is pretending to be a Hollywood-trained grandfatherly voice of wisdom rather than a rhetorical nincompoop. He then drifts through the following points:
- Government needs more money, but it should spend less money.
- Sales tax may be charged at point of sale or point of delivery.
- It might be fair to let a New York tourist send sales tax on a purchase at Wall Drug back to New York.
- It's unfair to local businesses that online retailers don't have to pay sales tax.
- Local retailers are making big profits and should stop whining.
- Capitalism doesn't mean "leveling the playing field."
- Ford's church overbudgets to trick its parishioners into donating more... so government should get rid of unnecessary expenditures (no, really, Ford places these two ideas in one paragraph).
- Public libraries and due process are wastes of tax dollars.
- We need austerity; increased taxes hurt the economy and allow "vague 'redistribution' to who knows what kinds of liberal do-gooder programs."
I want to offer a coherent rebuttal to Ford's post, but I can respond coherently only as an English teacher: This post is an unrevised stream-of-consciousness regurgitation of osmosed radio-fog talking points that fails to develop a single clear thesis.
As I do Brad's work for him, the thesis I distill from his rant is that government (along with local retailers) is bad; therefore, tax-dodging and unfair tax enforcement are fine.
To excuse burping up all the ill-digested opinions gurgling in his gut, Ford unnecessarily embraces unfairness. Taxing online sales doesn't necessarily mean increasing government revenue or spending. We could tax online sales, access currently untouched economic activity, reduce the overall sales tax percentage, and thus lower the tax burden on consumers currently making up for online tax-dodgers. Or, instead of giving a break only to tech-savvy cheaters, we could ban sales tax altogether, clear a regressive tax from our books, and focus on making income and property tax more equitable.
Ford is utterly unaware that he's improperly fusing two separate policy debates. What we tax and how we tax it is one issue. What we spend our tax dollars on is another issue. We can have a fair and lively debate about what we want government to spend money on. But unless Ford is advocating anarchy (and his writing style suggests anarchy of thought), we know government is going to spend money on something, thus requiring a fair and enforceable system of taxation. To advocate unfair rules and unfair enforcement in taxation isn't just irresponsible writing; it's irresponsible citizenship.