payne's talking about the overhead involved in government subsidies. the last sentence conjures up images of crude calculations on a napkin over cocktails, but even assuming that payne's numbers make sense, he's not talking about the IRS'S EXPENSES as a percentage of TOTAL TAX REVENUES.
he's talking at best about the ENTIRE ECONOMY'S overhead as a percentage of THE PORTION OF TAXES USED AS SUBSIDIES.
so my take is that mallard fillmore is layering bu**sh** on top of bu**sh**.
http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/issues/articleid.18407/article_detail.aspSubsidies are now so deeply embedded in modern thinking and culture that a direct campaign against them is probably impossible. A forthright critic would simply find himself pilloried. It is not healthy to tell grandmothers and Washington Post reporters that "Uncle Sam" is a self-serving illusion. To have any hope of success, the effort to reduce the country's dependence on subsidies will have to follow indirect routes. One promising avenue is that of providing information about the overhead costs of subsidy systems.
Most people are not even dimly aware of the staggering waste involved in subsidy programs. What they see-once they get past the fallacies and euphemisms-is that money is taken from one place and shifted elsewhere. And then, in other subsidy programs, money is shifted back. Farmers are taxed in many ways, and then subsidized in others. Seniors are taxed, and then a lot of their taxes are given back to them in the form of medical care. And so on.
Politicians, policy experts and academics are amazingly complacent about the blizzard of cross-subsidies that now rages. Several years ago I asked a staff member of the Senate Budget Committee whether she was worried about this problem. Not at all. "It evens out," she said. "Everybody pays for everyone else's goods."
This view ignores the overhead costs of subsidies. When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you incur all sorts of losses. Peter's incentives to work, create, and invest are undermined. Very often, so are Paul's. The result is that economic effort, production, and employment are often lower than they would otherwise be.
And of course there are the costs of operating the tax system: compliance costs, litigation costs, tax planning distortions, and so on. A few years ago I made an attempt to add up all these burdens. The total was a 65 cent loss for every dollar of taxes collected.
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