One of the book sets I have to update from time to time is the United States Code Service (USCS), which only the Civil District Attorney’s office keeps. Today I got to work and found on my desk a box of new USCS volumes. These particular volumes were six books on Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code, so I’m guessing it was the whole of our federal tax code. I was encouraged when I removed the 2008 volumes and replaced them with the new ones because the new volumes were noticeably thinner, and in fact, when I shelved the new ones there was still a gap large enough that an additional book could have fit there.
We’re less than two weeks from the inauguration of a President who has all but promised tax increases for some (i.e. people less likely to vote for Democrats), proposed a myriad of tax “credits” for others (i.e. transfers of wealth to favored groups of people, most of whom don’t pay income taxes to begin with, and who are statistically more likely to vote for Democrats), and whose economic policies seem influenced more by class warfare and some vacuous (and unconstitutional) idea of “fairness” than by an actual knowledge of basic economics. So if I can take some encouragement in anything I’ve seen at work this week, it’s that I removed six volumes of Internal Revenue Code and replaced them with six new volumes of significantly smaller breadth. Does that mean our tax code has shrunk significantly in the past year? I don’t know, but I can’t think of any other reason those six books would be so much smaller than they were the last time I shelved them, and any time our tax code shrinks rather than grows in a given year, that is a good thing, in my opinion.
