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In the 1950s and pre-computers, audits were nearly meaningless unless you were Al Capone. The amount of resources needed to actually audit a large company was absurd compared to the resources needed to hide assets. That has changed significantly in the digital age. If you watch Boardwalk Empire and find yourself understanding how much easier violent crimes were in an age before forensic science evolved, the age before forensic accounting was similar for tax evaders. Anyone asking to 'go back' to the 1950s hasn't studied history much. The 1950s are not a good goal, if they were we would have kept things status quo since then. The question is not what part of the past would you prefer to live in, the question is what will the future be like and how can we best steer our nation toward prosperity.
Again, anyone who thinks 2 or 3 points of one bracket of a single type of tax will have a profound impact on job creation or our debt is missing the big picture completely. Closing loopholes is a matter of fairness as much as finance, but the things that will determine our fate in this century have much more to do with large scale changes to the way productivity is measured and rewarded.
People worry about how much money illegal aliens earn at $1/hour off the books jobs by standing around in a home depot parking lot because they ship their income home to their families... and ignore the fact that massive corporations are doing the same thing with many billions of dollars annually. People ignore the fact that brick and mortar businesses can't compete with online merchants in part because of a tax advantage and also ignore the fact that the result is many fewer people needed to handle all of the retail business that used to employ a lot of what are now 'extra people.'
We will not have enough jobs for everyone who is willing to work because we can produce all we need with many fewer workers than at any time in history - and that will only continue to accelerate. Even competent people who work hard and put in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay will be unable to find a worthwhile job. Not because billionaires make money. Not because China is evil. Not because people are lazy and unwilling to be retrained. It will happen because we have become more advanced and our technological advancement is accelerating at an incredible pace. That MUST be addressed on a global level and on a national one.
In the meantime we have a short term problem of robber barons, who are not tied to any nation, raping the economies of entire countries the exact same way they have been raping states (by demanding insane tax incentives and gifts). We idiotically treat a company like Goldman Sachs as if it is somehow similar to a company that is tied to a community and provides jobs while generating equity for our economy. In fact, we get them a much better deal than we give most of the companies that actually do provide lasting benefits to our society. The days of guys like Hershey building entire towns and bringing them to prosperity are not done... but the companies doing that important work for our country have NOTHING to do with the multinational robber barons who are siphoning wealth into clandestine bank accounts in Luxembourg. The real battle is not between rich and poor, employer and employee, one tax bracket vs another.... the real battle is between parasites (at the high and low end) and producers.
The first step to fixing things is accurately defining those groups and deciding what to do with the growing segment of society comprised of people who are willing but unable to produce. Dealing with people who abuse the food stamp should be easy. Dealing with people who flood the gulf with oil should be easy. Figuring out what to do with everyone else is the hard part... but we are so busy acting like those first two groups are complicated that we never reach step two of the solution. Wealthy people aren't going to 'create jobs' because they get a tax break. We also aren't going to balance the tax base by moving 2 or 3 points around on one marginal tax rate. It's time to actually start addressing the problems and stop allowing asshats to direct our attention to meaningless symptoms instead.
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