Revenge of the Tax Code

Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute says,

If it were a movie, it would be called "Revenge of the Tax Code." The complex income tax, which has bedeviled average Americans for years, is biting back at the elite who helped create it. Tom Daschle, former chief lawmaker in the Senate, withdrew his Cabinet nomination because of an "unintentional" $128,000 tax mistake. Rep. Charles Rangel, chief tax-writer in the House, is also entangled in a tax scandal, as is Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and Nancy Killefer, another high-ranking nominee who has withdrawn.

"What is going on here?", Edwards asks. Mainly, it's the complexity of the tax code that causes good people to blunder into a tax morass and calculating folk to walk away from tax obligations.

The solution? "The solution to all these problems -- from the Enron debacle to Obama's tax-troubled nominees -- is to reform the tax code. With a simple and consistent base, taxpayers would know what they owe, and the IRS could easily enforce it. That is the promise of the "flat tax," which would tax all income once and create a level playing field with no tax-free loopholes," Edwards writes.

Has the time for a serious discussion of the flat tax come? We'll see. Read the full report here.

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