ADF – Tax Reform

The novel American Democracy Forever introduces a tax reform proposal developed by the Forum Clubs and indicates that extensive modeling is needed to validate it. A later chapter discusses the modeling and beta testing of the proposal, but the details of the proposal are not discussed; the reader is left to wonder what the tax reform proposal might be.

In 2011, I (Richard A. Demers) wrote an essay on tax reform and created a limited spreadsheet model of my ideas. I then made a halfhearted effort to publicise it, ultimately realizing that I had no ability as an individual to get it adopted. But could it be incorporated into the text of ADF? Yes, it could, via a sequence of chapters that presented a discussion on tax reform by the adult members of Charlie Durand’s family, with my original essay as an appendix to the novel. Great, but it was too long and brought the flow of the novel to a halt. My editor recommended dropping both since ADF is not about tax reform per se; that’s just one social problem that Forum Clubs deal with.

But not to worry, the essay and the family dialogue were not deleted. Here they are:

• A Meeting of the Durand Family on Income Tax Reform and Wealth Inequality
• Income Tax Reform, A Citizen’s Proposal

Please add your comments about tax reform to this blog post.