ABC News is asking the question, “Should the CEO of GE, Jeffrey Immelt, be advising the President on business?” This question is being raised after it was revealed that General Electric paid no taxes for 2009 and 2010. But why now?

This very question was raised by Jim Vicevich of http://radioviceonline.com on January 21, 2011, but no one else in the media found the question interesting at the time. His concern about the assignment mirrored that of Erick Erickson when he said:

In other words, Mr. Obama wants to put in charge of job creation a man who has done his level best to contribute to high unemployment of the middle class, while subsidizing failed leftwing pundits at MSNBC.

Mr. Vicevich opinion is a bit more harsh:

President Obama’s corporate tax reform policy is about as vague and ambiguous as is his goals for Libya. As ABC writes:

President Obama apparently has a short memory. It wasn’t that long ago that he declared that subsidies should be taken away from oil, coal, natural gas and other fossil fuel industries and given to new energy wind, solar and nuclear industries instead to fund research and development of technologies with dubious futures. He is saying on the one hand that government should partner with business to move along a national agenda (that suits his aesthetics, politics and viewpoints) and punish those others by stripping them of subsidies they now possess or blocking them from access to future subsidies.

To be fair to President Obama, he is doing nothing different than his predecessors since the election of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was the President who brought us the Federal Reserve, Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Farm Loan Act and the progressive income tax. He also brought us the Revenue Act of 1913. His immoral work was used as a foundation for the immoral work done by FDR and his so called “Brain Trust” who left us with most of the problems we have today.

It seems to me that if the government wants to truly clean up taxes that it would push for a fair tax for both business and individuals alike. It could consist of two or three tiers, one for the individual taxpayer, one for small business (earning up to x dollars above costs) and one last one for the multinational corporations such as General Electric. The key to this tax is that it eliminates the income tax and does not simply add on a value added tax that creates more harm to lower income, income tax paying people than a fair tax would.

This idea is nothing new. It’s been around a long time; so, if you don’t hear people in power speaking of taking it up for consideration in establishing a clean, fair and transparent tax system that is loophole free, they are not taking tax reform seriously. Until they do take tax reform seriously and adopt some form of fair tax without loopholes, expect to read more stories about how General Electric pays no taxes on 14.2 billion in profits. In contrast, Exxon paid 15 billion or 47% of pretax earnings in taxes, but none of it went to the United States. Chevron and Conoco Philips also paid more than half of their earnings in income taxes. No wonder they protest the loss of subsidies to other energy development corporations and this, along with a high U.S. corporate tax rates may be part of the reason non U.S. treasuries are expanding as ours shrinks.

Picking winners in losers is nothing more than government choosing which pockets to pick and which to give a small token to in exchange for something or some behavior government wants. It is anti-liberty and anti-American if one considers the U.S. Constitution and the strong desire by our founders to protect individual rights and, in particular, personal property rights. U.S. tax policy, especially progressive taxation, is an anathema to liberty and should never have been accepted. We are beyond the point of choosing to change. Change is needed and it is needed now.