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Conrad Black: How to fix our broken tax system

We need to incentivize our most successful capitalists to participate in job creation and the fight against poverty

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From time to time over seven years I have inflicted upon readers some of my public policy ideas, including a partial privatization of the welfare system. The method envisioned is using the tax system to impose a very small and refundable wealth tax to enlist the wealthiest and most financially sophisticated people to assist in job training and creation. It would have to be carefully designed and the taxpayers would have to understand it as part of a comprehensive program of cost and tax reduction and that the additional tax was refundable. Instead of being an assault upon the means that they have amassed by their own work and ingenuity or even inheritance, it would be borrowing from them by the state in the public interest to enlist the sagacity of the taxpayer to supplement the efforts of the welfare system in increasing employment and assisting the disadvantaged. It would be designed to encourage the replacement of outright payments to the unemployed with opportunities for them to sustain themselves through gainful employment.

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This suggestion was accompanied with a large number of other proposed public policy initiatives and all of these thoughts were published in a thin volume of mine about ten years ago........

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