Argentina’s President Javier Milei is rapidly becoming one of my heroes. He’s what we so desperately need here: an actual, by-gosh small-government advocate willing to come in and swing a meat axe to chop down excessive government. In his latest move, he announced the dissolution of Argentina’s existing tax bureau, which will be replaced by a smaller, more efficient agency.
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Argentina’s government has announced it will dissolve its current tax bureau and replace it with a new “simplified” agency, cutting a third of jobs in the process.
In a statement, President Javier Milei’s government confirmed the closure of the Administración Federal de Ingresos Públicos (AFIP) and the creation of the Agencia de Recaudación y Control Aduanero (ARCA).
The new entity will maintain AFIP’s current dual role of overseeing tax collection and customs monitoring.
More than 3,000 AFIP agents who joined during former president Alberto Fernández’s 2019-2023 government will be laid off as part of a 34 percent reduction of current staffing levels, said the statement.
This, readers, is what we small-government types refer to as “a good start.” The AFIP folks were quick to react.
This, as the saying goes, is “the Way.”
It’s no secret that our taxation system is well and truly out of control. The tax code makes “War and Peace” look like “See Spot Run.” Nobody really understands it, including the people charged with enforcing it. My wife has done our taxes for almost 30 years now, and with our various business ventures and my propensity for self-employment, that can be a complicated process. She will tell you, having dealt with the IRS all that time, that if you call the IRS help line for advice and talk to three different people, you’ll get three different answers. The purpose of taxation – the confiscation of our assets by force of law – should be to fund the essential functions of government and nothing more. But our system has become a labyrinthian system for picking and choosing winners and losers, for favoring selected parties at the expense of others, and for buying votes.
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It’s well to the left of insane. The power to tax is the power to destroy, and the current government seems awfully willing to wield that power.
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Has it come to this, that we should look to Argentina to show us the way? It would seem so. There are as many proposals to streamline the tax code as there are stars in the sky, it seems, but I’d be happy with the one that allows the filing of one’s tax return on a postcard, perhaps one that asks one question and makes one requirement:
Q: What was your income for calendar year 20XX?
R: Send in 6.2 percent. (Or whatever. Less is better.)
Tax reform is only one part of getting the federal Colossus under control, of course. There is also the need to return the federal government to within its proper boundaries, and once again, Javier Milei has shown us the way. Honestly, I never get tired of watching this:
Again, can we do that here? We do have a guideline, after all, on what the federal government issupposed to look like.
- Department of Commerce – Afuera!
- Department of Education – Afuera!
- Department of Energy – Afuera!
- Department of Health and Human Services – Afuera!
- Department of Homeland Security – Afuera!
- Department of Housing and Urban Development – Afuera!
- Department of Transportation – Afuera!
- Environmental Protection Agency – Afuera!
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I’d be happy with that – for starters.