BUCK: Let’s get to the Democrats’ reconciliation bill, one part of this that everybody should be reminded of. Ted Cruz was hammered on this, Senator Cruz of Texas. They’re gonna… I mean, I look at this — you gotta be kidding me — 87,000 IRS agents? 87,000? Here he is.

Schumer-Manchin would fund 87,000 IRS agents.

Just imagine THOUSANDS of IRS agents descending upon America like a swarm of locusts! pic.twitter.com/4lMejTrOvT

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) August 3, 2022

BUCK: It is. they talk about what’s fair in the tax code. All right, libs. How about this one? Why don’t we have a fair tax or a flair tax — combination of a flat and a fair tax, the fair tax is amazing. Maybe I just came up with something. It’s a tax that is just got a lot of vibe to it, you know, a lot of… No. But either a flat tax or a fair tax. I bring those both up because whenever I talk about one, I get all these emails and messages saying, “No, it’s the other one is the good one.”

Okay. Well, I had a conversation with Ted Cruz years ago. Saw him in person here in New York at an event. I remember I talked about him, oh, my gosh. This was like 2015, 2014, maybe. And he said, “Look. We’re gonna put the…” This is when he was thinking about running and did run for president. He said, “We should have the tax code be simplified to the point where it’s a page long and the IRS should be just a very straightforward compliance bureaucracy, ’cause everybody knows what they owe.”

It’s not hard, and you can pay your taxes with a… What’s the thing you send in the mail that you can read it on one side and the other is usually a picture? I’m forgetting what that’s called. (interruption) Postcard. Thank you. Good job, Buck. Buck is good with the words today on the radio. Yeah. You can pay your taxes with a postage card, effectively just, “Here it is, boom,” or just send in a simple check because you could do the math on the back of a napkin.

You know, “I made $65,000 this year; I pay 15%. End of story.” You know, do a calculator, or if you want to do it old school like you’re back in high school, do the math on a little card and you send it in. Instead… I mean, I’m pretty good with the reading comprehension. I got an extension on my taxes. I tried to read through it. I don’t even know what we’re talking about here. I give it all to an accountant and say, “Help me and tell me and…” It’s crazy. But why won’t libs give that up?

Because the opaque nature of the tax code and the — the gray areas of it and the size of it — creates a lot of room for social engineering, creates a lot of room for carve-outs, for goodies. And this is why you’ll notice, every important bill that comes out of Congress these days it seems like… Certainly. Democrats are in charge! Obamacare, now this. Even when they do continuing resolutions and reconciliation bills and all this stuff, it’s always 500 pages, 1,000 pages, 1,500.

Because it’s just a compendium of different interests all slapped together and the Democrats sell it with a couple of key phrases, “Oh, this will bring down your prescription drug costs.” “Sound good. Let’s do it!” “Well, hold on. What else do it do — and does it really even do that?” They hope that we don’t pay attention. Should check with… I remember hearing years ago that there was a period in the Roman republic. And this is one of the things maybe it’s an urban legend, so I’ll just put this out there.

But I think this actually happened where they had to display laws. You know how when you start a limited liability corporation, for example, there’s still this… A lot of places have it. I know New York does. You have to take out an ad in, like, a local newspaper, you know? You take out an ad to say, you know, “Buck’s LLC is now a thing,” and it creates a public verifiable record of the existence of it. This is a thing that you do.

Go back to Ancient Rome. They would change laws and it was supposed to be on a column, and they would write what the laws were on this column. And then increasingly — and again, if this is urban legend, let me know. But the story was that they would write the laws higher and higher on the column. So they were writing the laws, but nobody could read them unless you wanted to get some kind of a ladder or something.

Nobody could actually see what was actually being written on the column. That is, even if it’s just a metaphor, even if it’s just apocryphal, that is a story very similar to what our Congress is doing all the time now. Who reads these things? Who reads them? I tell you this. Supreme Court opinions, they’re very long a lot of the time. You know, not 500 pages long but, you know, a lot of them are a hundred pages long.

There’s a lot of legalese in there. But if you read the first usually five pages, even the first two or three pages, you get a pretty good sense of what’s at issue. You have some idea as to what the decision was and how it came down. You can get a basic idea of it. You try to read one of these 500-page bills and you look at this, you’re like, “Wait. What? This is on purpose, right? That’s what you need to understand.”

No one who is currently out there as a Democrat on TV is saying, “This bill’s great! Hundreds of billions. It’s gonna improve manufacturing, yada yada.” They haven’t read this thing. They have no idea. They have no idea. So, Joe Manchin’s out there trying to sell it. Meanwhile, in the background, a lot of people are saying, “Hold on. Thousands, tens of thousands of IRS agents? Why are we adding to a bureaucracy that should be actually phased out with the simplification of the tax code?”

It would be enormously beneficial to all of us to have a tax code that was very straightforward. But, you know, we see this… Why does New York have an income tax and Florida doesn’t? One state is well governed; the other isn’t. It’s a question of who wants to be in charge and who wants to take stuff from you ’cause they think they’ll do a better job with your money than you will.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) does not answer directly when asked if Democrats “played” him on reconciliation:

“It’s not a question of being played here … Manchin had agreed to something he had said … he would never agree to.” pic.twitter.com/JCAcXuRA5m

— The Recount (@therecount) August 3, 2022

BUCK: So why did Manchin do it, go along with it? We’ve been talking about that, but I do think it is interesting because here’s a guy who, for the last year or so had really set himself up as somebody who frustrates the more radical, progressive impulses of his party and then at the last moment he decides to bail them out from facing the voters under the reality of the failures of the Biden economic policies we’ve all seen so far. Why? Why do that?

As I’ve said, I believe because it’s his advantage for himself on this. He’s not going to win another election in West Virginia. And if this goes forward, I will tell you, I will do what I can to make sure the people of West Virginia know that this is not somebody who should be representing them in the Senate. And then there’s the Sinema component of this, and so far, that’s lining up exactly as I had anticipated yesterday.

She’s gonna be a “yes,” but she’s gotta play the “maybe I want to look at it a little bit, maybe I want to add a few things” because of exactly what I was talking to you about just a few moments ago. Everybody wants to be able to just tack on their stuff in the bill that nobody reads that becomes law that affects you and me and the economy.

And it’s gross. It’s gross. It’s a 500-page, thousand-page bill. This should never really happen. I mean, there’s no real justification for this, certainly on issues like Green New Deal spending. Tell us where it is, where’s the money going, and what are you trying to do. But transparency is an enemy to bureaucracy. You always gotta remember that. They hate transparency.