The US tax system - 16 February 1996

I've often wondered, hoped, that every university in the democratic countries around the world would set up something as regular as the English or science departments, namely a department of Comparative Democracy.

The idea would be to learn how other democracies do things that you think you do well or badly or do in another way. For instance, during the Second World War, American reporters – both press and radio – in England, often expressed shock or superior surprise that the prime minister never held press conferences. They liked to point to the president's press conference as one of the minor glories of American democracy and this complacency might have gone unpunctured if one day an American journalist hadn't managed to get the question to Mr Churchill himself and without a pause, he replied: "In our democracy, the first duty of the prime minister is not to answer the questions of the press but of the people. The common people have a prior right, through their representatives in the Commons".

In other words Question Time in the House of Commons was seen to be the equivalent of a presidential press conference, probably more demanding, since the prime minister is regularly put on the griddle by the lawmakers themselves and not by just the media whenever the president feels like it. And if you were to attend several sessions of the United States Senate, sooner or later you'd hear some senator say with a proud blush and throbbing temples, that the Senate of the United States is the greatest deliberative body in the world. I've heard this a hundred times, more, and never heard it questioned, never heard a reporter say: I wonder if this man has ever sat in India's Lok Sabha, Sweden's parliament, Australia's, Germany's, not to mention the British House of Lords, which since nobody is running for election, having a seat to protect, can afford to deliberate issues and, at its best, does so without the mockery, the booing, the point scoring that can make debates in the lower House so mean and un-serious.

There's an enormous field of enlightenment for any democracy in studying comparisons between how things are done in your country and how they're done in different parts of this country. Now that may seem a clumsy way of putting it, but I deliberately avoided saying it in the usual form. When I'm in England, friends are always saying to me, how do they handle this problem in America? To which the only sensible answer is another question, which state do you have in mind?

One little lesson and one which every generation of foreigners needs to learn about the United States is the great powers of each of the 50 states. The United States, that's to say, the federal constitution – by the way, every state has its own written constitution – the federal constitution has two clauses that guarantee the sovereignty of a state in many things. First, Article Four of the Constitution says each state must give credit to the public acts etc. of every state. The prime example being given, that each state has the right to extradite and bring back for punishment anybody who escaped from a crime or from service, say, in the militia, into another state.

The second is from the Bill of Rights and is most often quoted by people, and there's a whole political party of them around today, who believe that Washington, the federal government, has too much power. This is it, the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution are reserved to the states respectively or to the people".

What powers? Considerable. Each state has its own banking laws, laws on education, public health, divorce, liquor control, death penalty, homosexuality, wife and child abuse, driving licences, drug penalties. In fact every state has its own criminal code. OJ Simpson was not charged under any law of the United States but under the criminal laws of California, which you may have noticed have one or two privileges and denials of their own. The trial, for instance, was televised. This is up to each state. Some allow TV, some do not. So far the federal judiciary does not allow television in federal trials.

When President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, some reporters were amazed that no federal police officers were on call. But in the United States there is no national police force. The FBI is an investigative arm of the Department of Justice and its job is to investigate all violations of federal laws, and its busiest business has always been investigating kidnappings, escaped prisoners, motor car racketeering, prostitution and other crimes which involve criminals who cross state borders. They can't, on their own, go looking for a criminal who stays within his own state, unless he's committed a federal crime, when the local office of the FBI would move in on him. So when, as I say, Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, in Dallas, Texas, there was then no applicable federal law against shooting the president of the United States. The handling of the scene and the consequences was entirely in the hands of the Dallas City Police.

Apart from the independent powers of the several states being a curiosity, they have the virtue of offering many laboratories of law-making for issues that are before the country. For instance, in the whole hullabaloo which has been resounding through the country since Mrs Clinton devised her enormous, elaborate and as it now appears, ill-considered federal health system, since then many states have gone ahead creating their own. Maine has one, Oregon something quite different, Wisconsin. More and more states are passing their own set of laws about health insurance and also many of them want to have Washington, the federal government, stop administering even Medicaid, the national system for the very poor and Medicare, the lavish system for the old, rich or poor and give the money appropriated by the Congress over to each state as a block grant and let the states do the administering.

As many of them say, we know better the needs of our people than those politicians in Washington, which offhand, sounds sensible enough. Looking over the experiments that have been tried, in some things you have to wonder whether extending self-government in vital issues: drugs, inner city poverty, illegitimacy, assisted suicide, you have to wonder whether handing the money and the administration of these problems to the several states will offer 50 new ideas or 50 possibilities of corruption. Probably both.

There is an issue that is either too delicate or too hot to handle in the debates of the men now seeking the presidency and about to get a passport to the White House or their comeuppance next Tuesday in New Hampshire. It's the much-debated issue of no fault divorce. Divorce laws are, of course, also a privileged monopoly of each state. The grounds vary greatly.

Some of you may remember the roaring days in Nevada. Way back, when every other state required adultery or brutality or desertion, Nevada said, come to Reno. In those days, say you want a divorce, stay six weeks and go back home a free man or woman. Nevada got so good at this that the divorce industry moved to the blazing resort city of Las Vegas, where it combined quick divorce in the morning with quick marriage in the afternoon, as one of the state's more profitable amenities.

Well now there's one state which has for years boasted of being a pioneer in granting no fault divorce, just a declaration by both parties that they'd agreed on a divorce. It's revoked that law in the belief that it made divorce too easy and marriage a department store, where you could choose one item and if you didn't like it, pick another. It has now instituted a law which requires several of the old grounds and adds another, requiring all couples about to marry to have six month's counselling before they are allowed a licence.

But now, yesterday morning's paper reported one American federal institution, one federal law that Britain proposes to copy. For years it seems to me, congressmen have been rising, in the wracking month before our incomes tax forms and payments become due, waving a little postcard and saying: look how the British do it, it's all here in a few lines! This was always said by way of jeering contempt for the American income tax system, which requires a document, hundreds of lines and computations to fill out. In England they'll have to be filled in.

Every Congress swears it's going to simplify the tax system and the accompanying tax forms and usually the simplification takes the method of reducing the number of forms to fill out from say 39 to 69. I can only say, if ever there was such a thing as a collective shout of disbelief, it was sounded in the halls of Congress on Thursday when the word came in that the British, it says here, are to adopt an American style tax-filing system.

Now it's true on reflection, that Americans wouldn't put up for a minute with a system that simply sent them a bill, figured by the internal Inland Revenue and expected them to pay it. Which is why, I suppose, we have a system that could best be symbolised by a maze climbing up the tower of Babel. You put down the figures, the income, the detailed expenses, the hoped-for deductions, This takes pages and pages. You or your accountant does the necessary mathematics.

I must say I don't know an individual man or woman whose mathematics, calculus or astrophysics, are advanced enough to be able to cope with the tax forms on their own. Your accountant does the work, sometimes phones you as April the 15th approaches and begs you to beg an extension because some new items on the forms have baffled him. Eventually it's all computed or as Americans say, computerised. You sign the cheque and wait. Maybe several years later you hear from them. They say you're wrong, you've been penalised and required to pay interest on the number of intervening years, all the years it's taken them to find the flaw. You can then dispute. If you, and I'm now throwing out a line to Britons alone, if you go for this American filing system, all I can say is, God be with you till we file again.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.