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Ted Cruz, the rock-ribbed conservative Texas senator who figures to be a factor in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, told thousands of conservatives Thursday morning that the IRS should go the way of the dodo. 'We need to abolish the IRS,' he said, calling instead for a flat income tax rate and a user-friendly tax return that can be filed on a postcard. That verbal gauntlet, thrown as much at a near-century of tax collection as at the Obama administration, was Cruz's biggest applause line.

To make fun of big efforts that produce small results, the famous Roman poet,Horace, wrote “The mountains will be in labor, and a ridiculous mouse will be brought forth.” That line sums up my view of the new tax reform plan introduced by Congressman Dave Camp, Chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee. To his credit, Congressman Camp put in a lot of work. But I can’t help but wonder why he went through the time and trouble. To understand why I’m so underwhelmed, let’s first go back in time. Back in 1995, tax reform was a hot issue....

On Tuesday a ballot measure to raise income taxes on Coloradans to raise funds for increased education spending failed. In fact, the measure, Amendment 66, didn’t just fail–it went down in flames. The measure was defeated by a 32 percent margin. This major defeat was in spite of the fact that the measure’s backers outspent the opponents by a large margin, raising $10 million to support the initiative, including a $1 million each from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Bill and Melinda Gates. Amendment 66 would have eliminated Colorado’s flat rate income tax of 4.63 percent in favor of...

Perhaps because he wants to divert attention from the slow-motion train wreck of Obamacare, the President is signalling that he will renew his efforts to throw more people into the unemployment line. Needless to say, that’s not how the White House would describe the President’s proposal to increase the minimum wage, but that’s one of the main results when the government criminalizes certain employment contracts between consenting adults. To be blunt, if a worker happens to have poor work skills, a less-than-impressive employment record, or some other indicator of low productivity that makes them worth, say, $7.50 per hour, then...

House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, who is expected to unveil his plan soon, is pushing forward with the idea of a tax code overhaul despite expectations that this Congress is too fractured to take on such a big project. The provision, available only to the roughly one-third of federal taxpayers who itemize, allows taxpayers to deduct from their income the value of state and local property tax paid, as well as state and local income or sales tax paid. Claimed by 46.6 million Americans in 2011, the deduction reduced U.S. tax revenues that year by...

When Gérard Depardieu triggered a fiscal feud with the French government a few weeks ago, the media had fun recasting him in his movie role as the comic book character Obélix, a fat and superhumanly strong Gaulois who stands up to the Romans. Now that the French movie star has abandoned the land of the Gauls to become a Russian citizen, his recent film role as the mad monk Rasputin is being evoked to put a cinematic image on a bizarre real-life drama that has become an affair of state. ...Depardieu's love for Russia cannot be indifferent to the country's...

What type of tax reform do you want? Simplification of the existing progressive income tax system? A flat tax? A sales tax? A value-added tax? Tax professionals, economists, elected officials and others heatedly debate the pros and cons of each. However, it is unlikely that real tax reform will occur until the financial crisis gets so bad that most people will agree to radical change. Most tax reform discussions and debates lead with the premise that any new tax system has to raise roughly as much revenue as the present system. Why should that be? Currently, the federal government spends...

Sen. Ted Cruz is joining Tea Party activists in calling on Congress to abolish the Internal Revenue Service as the freshman lawmaker made the case from tax reform. The Texas Republican on Monday said news that the IRS targeted the nonprofit applications of conservative-leaning political groups was an "inspiration" because of how it has sparked "normal American citizens that are standing up for liberty." In the wake of the IRS scandal, Tea Party groups have repeatedly called for the agency to close its doors, and Cruz, a hero of the conservative movement, echoed their sentiments. "It is a challenge that...

On Saturday, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said that the IRS–and much of the federal bureaucracy–needs to be abolished. Appearing on Fox News' "Cashin In" with Eric Bolling, Palin said that she agreed with Tea Partiers who want to abolish the IRS, suggesting that it would undercut much of the cronyism rampant in Washington.

While many waited for Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to take the weight of the world markets on his Ivy League shoulders by declaring QE-4EVR-LOL!, the real economists at the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco came up with a more detailed explanation for the poor, dragging, sluggish U.S. economy. What they found will astonish you. And yes, this is a true story. “[D]espite all the attention federal spending cuts and sequestration have received,” wrote Brian Lucking and Daniel Wilson in the FRBSF Economic Letter, “our calculations suggest they are not the main contributors to this projected drag [on U.S....

Our new tax system must be very simple and highly transparent to the average taxpayer. NO more vicious IRS attacks against taxpayers (garnishment of wages, freezing assets, interviewing employers, family, or friends). NO more need for interpretation of convoluted, ambiguous or lengthy regulations. NO more manipulation of Congress by lobbyists for benefit of special interests. NO more manipulation of IRS by Congress or the White House for political benefit. NO annual individual tax filing should be required. No rules to read and comprehend, no shoebox of receipts to keep, no tax software to buy, no tax accountant to hire, no...

It is way past time to stop talking about replacing the tax code, and to start talking about what to replace it with. The good news is that there are three great options for replacing our complex, unfair and outdated century-old tax code. Only a fool or a power hungry bureaucrat would want to keep the complex, unfair 74,000-page tax code we have today. Here is a brief description of each great plan: The Fair Tax, the Flat Tax, and the 9-9-9 Plan. Fair Tax The FairTax is a revenue-neutral, single-rate, federal retail sales tax collected only once, at the...

Jay Leno told his studio audience the other night that President Obama should forget his plans to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and instead close the IRS. The applause was instantaneous and the laughs were loud and genuine. Most ordinary Americans would have whooped and hollered in favor of Leno's idea long before they learned the IRS has been caught targeting conservative political groups and wasting millions on moronic employee-training conferences. But the IRS is no joking matter. The average working American -- poor or rich or in-between -- hates and fears the IRS for good reason. Able...

Jay Leno told his studio audience the other night that President Obama should forget his plans to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and instead close the IRS. The applause was instantaneous and the laughs were loud and genuine. Most ordinary Americans would have whooped and hollered in favor of Leno's idea long before they learned the IRS has been caught targeting conservative political groups and wasting millions on moronic employee-training conferences. But the IRS is no joking matter. The average working American -- poor or rich or in-between -- hates and fears the IRS for good reason. Able...

THE HISTORY OF THE SIXTEENTH AMENDMENT by Dr. W. Cleon Skousen Strange as it may seem, the Sixteenth Amendment (which gave the American people the affliction of confiscatory income taxes) was never supposed to have passed. It was introduced by the Republicans as part of a political scheme to trick the Democrats, but it backfired. Here's the story. The Founding Fathers had rejected income taxes (or any other direct taxes) unless they were apportioned to each state according to population. Nevertheless, an income tax was levied during the Civil War and upheld by the Supreme Court on the somewhat tenuous...

“Obama administration has demonstrated the willingness to use the machinery of Government to target their political enemies

Senator Ted Cruz offered a solution to the IRS’s scandal: get rid of the agency entirely and simplify the tax code so that tax returns fit on a piece of paper the size of a postcard. “We ought to abolish the IRS and instead move to a simple flat tax,” Cruz said on Fox News over the weekend. “Put down how much you earn, put down a deduction for charitable contributions, for home mortgage, and how much you owe,” he continued. “It ought to be just a simple, one-page postcard.”...

If the sluggish U.S. economy wasn’t reason enough for tax reform, the ongoing IRS scandal demonstrates how a devilishly complex tax code enables government mischief. But the flat tax — a longtime policy goal for many on the right — isn’t the realistic answer to either problem. Flat-tax advocates see headlines about an out-of-control IRS as a chance to put the idea back on the public-policy radar in way it hasn’t been since the 1990s. “This is why you need a flat tax,” Wall Street Journal economics writer Stephen Moore told Fox News recently. “If you get rid of two-thirds...

The evolving by the hour IRS scandal, in which the tax agency targeted conservative groups for examination and harassment, as detailed by the Washington Post, cries out for not only an investigation, but legislation. To be sure an investigation and the punishment of those responsible for politically motivated examinations and audits must happen. But the fact that the IRS did these things at all stems from the fact that someone wanted to target conservative organizations and perhaps people and, thanks to the existence of the IRS, they could. This therefore argues for an overhaul of the tax code that would...

Free enterprise, free markets, competition, and choice: All are timeless economic principles, but their application can and should evolve with changing economic circumstances. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the top income-tax rate was 70 percent, inflation was 13 percent, health-care spending was 10 percent of GDP, and publicly held debt was 26 percent. The average American was 30 years old.Today, the top marginal tax rate is 40 percent, and inflation is 2 percent. Health-care spending and the debt have both risen by nearly 80 percent as a share of output. The average American is 37 years...