For years, House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) didn’t pay taxes on significant parts of his income. When the IRS discovered this, it allowed him to pay the missing taxes without any of the normal penalties.
In 2009, Representative John Carter (R-TX) introduced the Rangel Rule, HR 735, which would extend to all U.S. taxpayers the same penalty-free and indictment-free IRS treatment enjoyed by Rangel for flagrant tax evasion — as required by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
I was thinking about this recently in a conversation where I was surprised to find that the people I was talking to didn’t know about RSA 193-H:2, which says:
On or before the 2018-2019 school year, schools shall ensure that all pupils are performing at the proficient level or above on the statewide assessment as established in RSA 193-C.
All pupils. There are no exceptions for pupils with special needs, pupils who don’t do well on tests, or anyone else.
Now, there isn’t a school in the state that has been within shouting distance of this since it was enacted. This means that every school in the state is in flagrant violation of the law.
So, it seems only fair that taxpayers in school districts around the state should be able to withhold their school taxes until the schools start complying with the law.
I know, I know — ‘the law’ requires them to pay those taxes. But ‘the law’ also requires the schools actually to teach kids to read.
The Rangel Rule, generalized to what we might call the Rangel Principle, simply says that if government institutions can ignore the law without penalty, then taxpayers funding those institutions should be free to do that, too.
Applied to this particular case, the penalty for withholding school taxes should be the same as the penalty for failing to teach kids to read. Which, apparently, is no penalty at all.
