If you go to the IRS website, there are about one thousand forms (and accompanying material such as instruction documents) that you can download.
Fortunately, most of us only have to worry about a small fraction of what’s on that list, but it’s still a nightmare – and one that gets worse every year because politicians have an endless appetite for manipulating our lives and auctioning off new loopholes for campaign cash.
So let’s take a few minutes to review the features of a tax system that is simple and fair (and pro-growth). I’m talking about the flat tax, which now is successfully working in about 30 nations.
Just a quick caveat for my friends who prefer the national sales tax. Yes, that system also would be a vast improvement. But since the Fair Tax or something like that would require a constitutional amendment to ensure that politicians couldn’t impose both a sales tax and income tax, that’s more of a long-term project.
A flat tax or a national sales tax would be better than our current graduated mess.
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A nice video. I very much like the elimination of deductions and the simplification. However, I am not so convinced about the flat rate. It would be just as easy to look up the tax in a table, allowing for more “progressive” taxation, and I am not so convinced about the harms of such progressivity. I think most high-income earners would not object to pay a higher rate. The high standard deduction in the scheme you present does make the system progressive, since the ratio of tax to gross income rises with gross income. However, an even more progressive system would be much easier to sell to the public and politicians of both parties.
I would be very interested to know, given the standard deduction and simplification you propose, what sort of tax table would produce total tax payments by gross income level similar to what we have under our current system.