Book Review: Side Effects: What Candidates Don’t Tell You
Side Effects: What Candidates Don’t Tell You. Tomas Payne. Finlee Augare Books, July 4, 2016, Trade Paperback and Kindle, 239 pages.
Reviewed by Dennis Hetzel.
You couldn’t have a timelier premise for a book. Side Effects: What Candidates Don’t Tell You intends to “cut through the BS” and take a fact-based look at the complex issues candidates should address directly instead of offering simplistic sound bites.
The devil, as the cliché goes, is in the details, and that’s where Tomas Payne lives in this book. In less than 250 pages, Payne addresses pretty much everything—tax policy, income inequality, national debt, immigration, healthcare reform, climate change, free trade vs. protectionism, tort reform, the war on terror, the roots of Muslim fundamentalism, and more.
That’s damn audacious. Between that and the obvious pen name of Tomas Payne—a riff, of course, on Thomas Paine, the “Common Sense” hero of the American Revolution—your first instinct will be to raise eyebrows in skepticism and seek hidden agendas. Consider the sheer scope of knowledge required. Payne’s ambitions reminded me of a 2003 best seller that achieved an even more audacious goal: Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.
So, guess what? For the most part, Payne actually pulls it off. If you care about what’s happening in American politics, you won’t regret the time invested in this book.
His scope of expertise is stronger in some areas than others, and sometimes his bias shows, but facts actually matter to Payne—quite a sharp contrast to some of our candidates. Just when you think you have him pegged as a doctrinaire free-market conservative, he surprises you. His views on climate change and tax policy are examples of this. Payne genuinely tries to go where facts lead him.
The real-life Tomas Payne is a Midwestern author who is a certified public accountant with an MBA in finance, a bachelor’s degree in political science, and thirty years of business experience. That explains why the chapters on taxation and economic policy are particularly strong.
Regarding taxation, he carefully and convincingly dissects both the Democrats who think income taxes can go much higher and Republicans who think taxes should always go down, down, down. Instead, he finds a sweet spot where tax rates work best. He demonstrates how taxing too much slows activity and disrupts incentives to invest. Then, he describes the serious damage that occurs if you starve government.
Payne’s take on immigration policy also provides fresh insight. You may not agree that immigration should be limited to years-earlier levels, but he documents the past impact on wages from wide-open immigration, and does so in a way that isn’t mean-spirited.
How should we deal with income inequality? He discusses notions most of us have never considered, such as the differences between wealth and income. Then, he persuasively shows why focusing on more taxation of “the one percent” may be a fool’s errand.
Less persuasive is his promotion of value added taxes to replace sales taxes and income taxes. He never addresses how many of the countries that have gone down the VAT road aren’t doing well, particularly in Europe. Nor does he address that VAT taxes are usually higher than sales taxes, which arguably affects lower income people more dramatically.
When Payne delves into health-care policy, he provides a well-reasoned, though depressing, analysis of the choices, with consumers having limited ammo against the combined power of big pharma, big government, big health insurance, big medicine, and big legal machinery. A deeper discussion on whether access to quality health care should be a fundamental right—albeit with some personal responsibility—is missing here.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if you agree with all his prescriptions for our problems. You come away with better questions. That’s a start toward better answers. The strength of this book is the impressive skill Payne uses to illuminate these complex, messy issues with facts and honest insight. He brings order to political noise with the kind of radical clarity that might have made his namesake proud.
Consider Side Effects like a policy prophylactic. It will protect you from what many candidates will spew between now and November, and it wouldn’t hurt for some of them to read it.