No super complicated tax code? That would put a LOT of people out of work, what like 1.2 million or more deal with it? Anyone have figures for how many tax prepares, accountants and lawyers are specialized in this?
Simplifying tax code wouldn't necessarily simplify tax preparation all that much. Calculating how much tax you owe based on your income is pretty trivial; the tricky bit is figuring out what your taxable income
is. That's the way many rich people minimize their taxes, after all - yes, Devin Richguy made $40M last year, but much of that was in unrealized capital gains, and then there were the deductions and offsets and depreciations and amortized losses from previous years and money that went into tax-deferred accounts and various tax-exempt sources of income . . . and, to be fair, a lot of those things really are legitimate reasons that Richguy's taxable income should be reduced.
Also, throwing out the 7000* pages of tax code won't necessarily make things simpler. I suspect that a lot of those pages are addressing otherwise-ambiguous cases, and throwing them out will just reintroduce a lot of ambiguities.
Lastly, as has been said in other contexts, all these laws have been written in blood. Nobody (well, almost nobody) was deliberately making the tax code obtuse and complicated. Every clause in those 7000 pages was put in there to address some real-or-perceived issue, and the idea that you can simply toss out most of it without manifesting many of those issues is simply absurd.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not particularly a fan of the US tax code. I think it
could be significantly simplified; I think a lot of those 7000 pages are there to help various special interests, or are addressing issues that no longer apply. I would absolutely support a thoughtful, thorough review of the tax code. But this isn't it.
*That "7,000 page" figure was in the preceding post by Andy_Ross, and I don't know if he got it from DTJr (probably) or some other source. It sounds plausible to me, but I haven't bothered to check it.
