From Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

* The standard income tax code is now estimated to be 60,000 pages;
* Last year, 60 percent of filers hired professional preparers;
* Psychiatrists “are trying to get ‘fear of tax filing’ designated as an official medical disability;”
* The Tax Foundation estimates that tax compliance costs the US economy $250 billion annually.

In the comments a couple of days ago, the John Earle left a link to Americans for Fair Taxation, an organization that advocates a consumption tax. I find the idea intriguing, but it seems almost too radical (it would require the repeal of the 16th Amendment, for instance, and predicting its effects on spending and tax revenues strikes me as well-nigh impossible to do). I also have questions about the logistics. For instance, a proposed rebate would serve as a way to exempt people below the poverty line from paying the tax. It would seem to me that proving you qualify for this would require some significant paperwork. Can we really expect our poorest citizens to cope with that? Certainly we’d have to put a huge bureaucracy in place to manage that facet of the scheme alone . . .

The Journal editorial proposes that we modify the Alternative Minimum Tax and use that as a kind of flat tax. Perhaps that would work.

We definitely need to do something. I’d heartily support any politician who showed some leadership on this issue . . . well, almost any politician, LOL

[tags] income tax, consumption tax, flat tax [/tags]