

On Monday, after a meeting with Republican governors, President Trump said about the efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act: “Now, I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”

All of the politicians who worked on the ACA know how complicated healthcare is. Doctors and nurses and insurers and pharmacists and administrators know how complicated healthcare is. Anyone who has filed a claim has at least some idea of how complicated healthcare is.

However, this article isn’t so much about healthcare and who does or doesn’t know how complicated it is. It’s about how so many things in our world have gotten complicated, why that’s unavoidable, and how we should approach complex matters.

The 70,000 Page Tax Code

Let’s take a great example that most people have some personal experience with: taxes. The length of the U.S. tax code is often quoted as 70,000+ pages, although it seems that number is drastically inflated to include all sorts of (admittedly essential to understand) case law. Regardless of whether it’s 70,000 or 2,500 pages, it’s long and complicated.

Republican politicians and nominees love to talk about how overly complicated the tax code is and propose “simple” alternatives. There’s Herman Cain’s catchy 9-9-9 plan, Rick Perry and Ted Cruz both proposed a flat tax that people could file on a postcard, and Carly Fiorina wanted to shrink that 70,000 page tax code down to 3 pages.

We’re not here to discuss whether any of those plans are good tax policy. But the common theme here is that simplicity is better. That a small town, blue collar worker should be able to understand their taxes. That’s not a terrible sentiment, but let’s look at where things get complicated.

Let’s put together our own tax plan as simply as possible. The government collects taxes to fund things like the military, infrastructure development and maintenance, and all sorts of projects that serve the public interest. Let’s pretend we can fund that stuff with a simple, flat income tax – say, 10%. For every dollar that you make, you need to send $0.10 to Uncle Sam.

Some questions immediately start to pop up:

If I own a house, and the house appreciates in value, is that income? If it decreases in value, do I subtract that from my income?

Do my returns on investments like stocks and bonds count as income?

If someone gives me a gift, does that count as income? Does it matter if it’s $20 or $20,000?

What if I need my income to support my children or my elderly parents who can’t work?

What if I’m using my income to do things that help the country, like donating to charities?

What if I’m putting money into my own business, essentially spending money to make money?

The first few questions require us to carefully define “income.” It might be easy to quickly come up with a definition that enables us to answer some or all of those questions quickly, but the important thing is that it needs to be considered and written carefully. The tax code is written in complicated legalese because, if you leave loopholes, people will exploit them. It needs to be specific and handle all of the cases we expect to come up.

The later questions also deal with how a person intends to spend their income. We, as a society, have decided that each person shouldn’t get taxed on the money that they need to cover the basic necessities of living – this is your “personal exemption.” We’ve also decided to incentivize behaviors we deem beneficial by providing tax deductions – things like donating to charity or putting money away for retirement.

Over time, we wrack up more and more exceptions to our initially simple rule. Every time someone has an additional question – “Well, what about if I had major, unexpected medical expenses this year? Can I catch a break because I live in a disaster zone and had to rebuild my house? How does any of this work if I’m not a citizen, but here on a work visa?” – we decide how to handle that situation and we add it to the tax code.

And we haven’t even gotten to ideas like “fairness.” A 10% tax rate on someone making $30,000 per year is going to have a much bigger impact on their standard of living than a 10% tax on someone making $3,000,000 per year. And again, whether we should have a tiered tax system is a great place to have debate – but anything we come up with is going to add more complexity.

And we’ve only covered personal income. Should we tax businesses? Should we have a sales tax in addition to an income tax? Property tax? Tariffs on goods from other countries?

So yes, it’s gotten long and complicated. But it can handle a lot of different situations with legal rigor. Most of them, the average person doesn’t have to deal with. If your life is pretty simple, you can file the 1040EZ, which is a single page. But for all of those “what if” cases, for complex multi-national businesses, for the billionaire with investments everywhere, the tax code needs to be complicated. It’s certainly not perfect – tax reform is a noble goal. But it’s never going to fit on three pages, and if it does, all of these questions the current system answers will come right back around.

It’s Not Just Taxes – Life Is Complicated

I’ve spent most of my adult life doing scientific research. It’s hard. The forefronts of science are in the weeds. If it was easy, it would have been done already. Every once in a while, someone looks at something like no one else ever has, or the technology gets to a point where a major breakthrough can occur, but it’s rare. The rest of the time, scientists are spending decades to be become experts in very, very specialized topics. They push the edge of their sub-sub-field ever so slightly outward. For every breakthrough, there are a hundred papers with narrow scope and lots of caveats. This illustrated guide to a Ph.D. by Matt Might contains an excellent visual that gets this point across.

Spending time trying to solve these complicated scientific problems has given me an appreciation for nuance, not only in science, but in life. Rarely is anything black and white. Rarely does one size fit all. Especially when people with different agendas get involved. When you start considering special cases or really get into the details, it always gets complicated. When something sounds too simple to be true, it probably is.

And things have only gotten more and more complicated in our digital, global age. Most people do not understand the first thing about the device they carry around that enables them to instantly communicate and share information with anyone in the world. Most people don’t understand the basics of how the device works, let alone how the information is transmitted and stored along the way, how it could get intercepted, how it could get sold and used according to the Terms and Conditions you didn’t read.

And that’s okay. None of us have the time or background necessary to know and understand everything. But that brings me to my primary points.

Stop Trying to Simplify Everything and Let the Experts Do Their Jobs

I know this can be a hard thing for some people. It can feel like an insult to your intelligence, ability, or pride. It can feel like a loss of control over things you own. A generation ago, it was a point of pride that a man could do most of his own car repairs. Today, with computers integrated into every car, hybrid batteries, and other complexities, it’s all but impossible.

But the world isn’t going to get simpler, it’s going to keep getting more complex. New professions, new technologies, and new research fields spring up every year. This is the direction our technology and our society is heading. You might be able to slow down and simplify your own life – keep that ’70s car tuned up and running, hold onto your early 2000’s flip phone. But the rest of society is going to keep on moving. And that’s a good thing, if we embrace it – it means new American jobs and industries. America has always lead the world in innovation. We need to lean into it.

So, without the ability to know and do everything ourselves, we need to rely on professionals and experts. This isn’t new – we’ve relied on electricians, doctors, lawyers, pilots, scientists, and engineers for decades. And of course, reliance isn’t the same as blind trust. Some might be crooked or bad at their job. You don’t know if the person you are asking for help is trying to rip you off or if they have their own agenda. By all means, do the research you need to do to make sure you can trust any given expert. However, most of them have an honest desire to help and a reputation to uphold. In the end, it’s unavoidable: you will need to trust, or at least utilize, the people who have dedicated their lives to knowing a certain trade or field.

Donald Trump, the Anti-Politician

I hope that I’ve convinced you that the world is complicated and that, in many cases, it’s unavoidable, maybe even desirable. But what does that mean for politics? Don’t fall for the catchy phrase promising simplicity. The tax code, the Affordable Care Act, regulations, refugees: they’re long and complicated pieces of policy because they deal with long and complicated issues. Anyone claiming to have the miracle fix that can fit on a single page probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about and probably doesn’t have a real plan to do what they’re saying. And that brings us back to where we started.

Trump made a lot of campaign promises that sounded great but were suspiciously simple. We’ll make healthcare cheaper and better and give you more choices. We’ll kick out all the illegal immigrants and build a wall. We’ll bring back the coal jobs and the factories. We’ll win on foreign trade deals. Crime will go down. The economy will get better and we’ll cut your taxes and still pay for all of these things we want to do. How? Believe me.

However, one of Donald Trump’s key appeals was that he’s a businessman, an outsider, not a politician. People were not happy with how politicians have been running Washington and they wanted a new and different approach. Maybe with a new perspective, there are simple solutions to some of these complicated problems. You can count me among the people who would like to see some new faces and fresh ideas in Washington.

But we also need to recognize two things: politicians do have a certain institutional expertise, and running a business and a government aren’t the same thing.

As a business owner, your primary concern is making enough money to keep the doors open. Beyond that, your other concerns likely include:

Maximizing profits for yourself or your shareholders

Competing or cooperating with other businesses

Making your customers happy

Making your employees happy

Doing something good for the world

Different business owners are obviously going to put different priorities on those items. I’d argue that focusing on the last several items make the earlier ones much easier.

As president, Donald Trump’s concerns now include:

Protecting the American people and running the military

Maintaining domestic stability: economics, race relations, crime

Maintaining international stability: alliances, military actions, and diplomatic communications

Keeping his campaign promises and politically posturing for re-election

Signing or vetoing laws submitted by Congress

Working with Congress to enact his own agenda

Being the public leader of the Republican Party

Representing all Americans

Management of all of the executive agencies: Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans’ Affairs

(And, if you’re a cynic, you might add the interests of his businesses which are still branded with his name and run by his children)

There’s a pretty stark difference in the skills and expertise needed between running a business and running the government. That’s not to say he can’t do it! But, as the first president to have no military or political experience, I’d argue that it’s necessary to have a humble acceptance of your limitations and to lean on the expertise of others who know how to get things done in the political sphere. Trump did promise, after all, that he knows the “best people.” But many of his cabinet members – Tillerson, Carson, DeVos, Mnuchin, Ross, McMahon – do not have any governing or military experience either.

So, is it a surprise that Donald Trump didn’t know that healthcare is complicated? Not really. But it’s a sign that he and his team have got a lot to learn about their new jobs. There’s no simple set of knobs for “affordable” and “quality” on the healthcare dashboard. There are trade-offs, compromises, market forces, and freedoms to contend with. Maybe with their combined business experience, they will find a new, better solution. I hope they do. But I can guarantee it’s not going to be “simple.”

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