Finance

Trumpy Claus And Krampus Musk's Christmas Gifts: A Few Ideas That Are Actually Good (Albeit Unoriginal)

Buried amid all the gift-wrapped underwear and hideous sweaters, we might find one or two things we will enjoy.

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holiday-gifts-Christmas-presents-shopping-gift-guide-300×199Back in 2010, I was in law school, discovering, to my great surprise, that I actually liked the class Federal Income Taxation. One of the hot topics in tax law at the time was the Bipartisan Tax Fairness and Simplification Act of 2010.

Even though just about everybody agreed that a simplified tax code would be better, “just about everybody” did not include the multibillion-dollar tax prep industry. The Bipartisan Tax Fairness and Simplification Act of 2010 never became law. It died the tragic death of a good idea in Congress.

Fast forward to 2024, with Elon Musk set to take over the faux governmental agency DOGE in the New Year. Musk claimed in a post on his website X that simplifying the tax code would “increase productivity” and prevent “bizarre tax-avoidance behavior.”

Nobody knows the full details of what Musk is proposing, but it seems like a big part of it would be eliminating a number of deductions and cutting down from the current seven income-based tax brackets to something like two or three. Hm, now where have I heard these proposals before? Oh, that’s right: the Bipartisan Tax Fairness and Simplification Act of 2010, which suggested three tax brackets and a higher standard deduction but elimination of many of the highly specific deductions for special interest groups.

And you know what? That’s just fine. If Musk wants to take credit for coming up with the idea of simplifying the tax code, and if Donald Trump can actually get what seem to be good ideas for doing that through a Congress that he is going to control, great. Let’s not cut off our nose to spite our face here.

Trump himself has recently proposed (he did bring this up previously in 2019) ending daylight saving time. He promised that the Republican Party would try to “eliminate” the semiannual clock changes.

Once more we have a good idea here. Not an original idea, by any means. But who cares? The Republican Party will control both houses of Congress and the White House in 2025, so if it really wants to kill daylight saving time, it should have no problem doing so. This would benefit all of us.

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Another DOGE development is Musk’s criticism of wasteful spending at the Pentagon and private defense contractors’ abuse of an overly inflated budget — ironic, perhaps, in that Musk’s own companies have secured billions in Defense Department contracts. Irony aside, this stance has earned Musk some potential progressive allies, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who said Musk was “right” about excessive defense spending. Sanders claimed that the Pentagon “lost track of billions” and that the “defense budget [is] full of waste and fraud.”

Wedging apart a commercial defense industry and a military that are more tightly entwined than two unchaperoned teens at the Snow Daze dance, and saving some tax dollars while you’re at it, is hardly a new concept. This one’s so old that Dwight Eisenhower talked about it in his farewell address.

Of course, the problem with good, though unoriginal, ideas is that someone has already tried and failed to implement them. Musk’s experience running his own companies as an executive is very different than whipping votes in Congress. We’ll see how much sway DOGE has over Congresspeople once a small army of corporate lobbyists in service to the tax prep and defense industries descend upon them.

Can any of this actually get done? DOGE definitely has its skeptics.

Yet, Trump has one thing going for him. Although Trump’s lip service to unifying the country has been utterly laughable, there is no doubt that he’s succeeded wildly in unifying the Republican Party — namely unifying it in doing whatever Trump tells it to do. With almost every extant Republican a proven Trump loyalist, and with Musk’s added threat to fund primary challenges to any GOP mavericks, some of these proposals have a better shot of getting implemented than they’ve had in a long time.

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In the meantime, there is really no benefit to naysaying. Plenty of bad ideas are going to be coming out of the new Trump administration. Might as well try to help usher a few of the good ones along.

While you might not exactly be hanging your stockings with glee this year, take a little comfort in the likelihood that a few ideas that are not the worst might have a chance in the new year. Another Trump presidency and the world’s richest man leading a fake government efficiency office might not be the Christmas gifts we want, but they most certainly are the Christmas gifts we deserve.

 

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