About the Check Box

George Will

Taxpayers were given the power to direct, by a checkoff on their income tax forms, $1 of their tax bill to the fund.

Why does the political class use this sneaky approach rather than a straightforward appropriation for itself? The question answers itself.

Even though the checkoff does not increase the individual's tax bill, support peaked in 1981, when 28.7 percent of taxpayers used it. So even then it was opposed by more than 70 percent of taxpayers. In 1994 Congress responded by increasing the checkoff's value to $3. This empowered fewer people to divert more money from the government's pool of revenue collected from all taxpayers. All this to fuel a program opposed by the vast majority of taxpayers, a program that subsidizes political advocacy that most taxpayers do not endorse.

Because by now 90 percent refuse the $3 checkoff, the Federal Election Commission, which has a bureaucracy's metabolic urge for self-aggrandizement, lobbied the largest manufacturers of tax preparation software to take two measures to promote the checkoff system.

Hitherto the companies' software, reflecting their customers' obvious preference, used "no" as the default option. But the FEC got the companies to change that and to include an advertisement for the checkoff, saying that it "reduces candidates' dependence on large contributions from individuals and groups and places candidates on equal footing in the general election." That bit of puffery is simplistic to the point of tendentiousness: Large hard-dollar contributions (larger than $5,000) are illegal, and there is much more to "equal footing" than hard-dollar equality in the post-convention sprint to Election Day.

Here's a fun fact. Gentlemen who wear bow ties intentionally make the knot or the tie look crooked or sloppy. This is apparently the way to tell who ties one, and who wears a fake one.

Politics Posted by AlexC at May 27, 2006 8:16 PM