| Did he fly that plane into the building because he hates us?
Matt Yglesias has a useful meditation on the incident that I'd recommend, but I think going a step further and asking ourselves about the other frustrations here are fair.
I read most of the "manifesto" posted by the alleged pilot yesterday and a number of things popped out at me. Some of it was simply the libertarian populism disdainful of both big government and big corporations. But a lot of it was someone saying if government can take care of all of these big companies, why the hell can't it do anything for someone like me?
I've spent the last week preparing business tax returns for DP Productions LLP, the very small business I run with a friend producing Montana is for Badasses merchandise. The operation basically produces a little beer money, has assets under $5,000 and gross revenue well under $10,000 per year. I've still got to tackle something like 5 federal and state tax forms that total about 15 pages in length, mostly of duplicative information (and these forms have hundreds of pages of fairly dense instructions). It strikes me as pretty absurd. And I think anyone else who has tried to do their own taxes would come to much the same conclusion.
There are safety net questions in this incident. Making sure people hit hard by economic situations often outside their control have access to support would probably reduce these sorts of incidents. But there's a form of government reform here that could also help. It is less about making the government smaller and more about making it work for people instead of the other way around.
I heard recently that one reason taxes are so complicated is that companies that make tax software actively lobby to keep it complicated so people have to buy their products. The fact that members of Congress don't laugh such lobbyists out of their office (assuming this story isn't apocryphal) is unreal. |
