In its yearly report released last week, the Taxpayer Advocate Service notes what the public has known for decades:
“America’s taxpayers deserve a simpler and less burdensome tax system that enables them to comply with their tax obligations expeditiously….”
Every year, the wave of confusing and often contradictory words and numbers washes over taxpayers. The IRS has an almost limitless number of forms, publications, schedules, instructions and rules ”” all totaling roughly 70,000 pages ”” that must be sifted through before taxes can be filed.
The taxpayer advocate says that the entire exercise takes 7.6 billion hours.
Simpler, flatter and rid of the idiotic corporate tax. How about a national sales tax (with a base exemption)?
That would destroy the government’s ability to coerce public behavior and grant largess. It will never happen. Raising revenue is mearly a secondary objective.
As the swallows return to Capistrano every year like clockwork, so do the proposals to simplify and bring some reason to the Tax code. Alas, for many reasons, among them the reasons cited Br. Michael’s rather pithy and only somewhat cynical observation, it never happens.
Agreed, #2 and #3. We’ve given up on the idea of liberty, and now beg for our chains.
The prima facie evidence for the need for a simplified tax system is the fact, prominently displayed in the national news, that the prospective Secretary of the Treasury seemed unable to submit an accurate tax return from 2001 through 2004. Putting aside the quite proper questions that circumstance might occasion were he of the other party, it does make clear that our tax system is overly complicated and driven by legislative perquisite rather than the need to generate the appropriate number of dollars needed to provide for the minimum needs of government of, by and for the people.
Eh…too many tax lawyers and CPA’s in the world to ever let that happen.
There’s an argument for moving income taxes from individual taxpayers into the corporate setting (as it was, at least more so, 50 years ago). Of course, we pay for it one way or another, but subjecting it to the business process could very well wring some efficiencies out of that money, and, maybe, just maybe, cut into the social manipulation referenced in #2 through 4 above.
Better, though, to do away with taxing income altogether. I don’t remember the exact quote, but an argument against the 16th amendment was that it was give the government oversight of every shopkeeper’s cash register and every farm wives egg money. And so it has!
Sorry Archer, they are leading the charge for reform. E.g., in Calif. they got the conformity bill several years ago, so that CA tax is based on Federal return, eliminating the different state return.