Who is James Payne and what hole did he pull these numbers out of? This guy just spits out numbers without any backing. At least the $250 Billion number had some research behind it, and even that most of that number is not applicable to costs to businesses. Some random quote from a guy back in 1994.
Who is James Payne
A 1996 Bradley Fellow at The Heritage Foundation
Search James L. Payne
"Editor's Note: Political scientists James Payne has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins, and Texas A&M. He wrote his first book (published by Yale University Press) while an undergraduate at Oberlin College and now has over a dozen books and monographs to his credit.. Disappointed with the irrelevance and left-wing orientation of the academic political science discipline, Payne resigned his tenured professorship (at Texas A&M) in 1985, and became an independent, free-lance scholar living in Sandpoint, Idaho. His recent works include an analysis of Congress and the budget (The Culture of Spending: Why Congress Spends Beyond Our Means), an evaluation of the tax system (Costly Returns: The Burdens of the U.S. Tax System), and an examination of social assistance policies (Overcoming Welfare: Expecting More From The Poor - And Ourselves)."
and what hole did he pull these numbers out of?
refer: The Flat Tax; Hall & Rabushka, '95:
Notes & References:
A comprehensive review of all the studies that attempt to measure the costs associated with the federal income tax appears in James L. Payne, Costly Returns: The Burdens of the U.S. Tax System (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1993). Payne summarizes the estimates of compliance costs that appear in the following studies: Joel Slemrod and Nikki Sorum, "The Compliance Cost of the U.S. Individual Income Tax System," National Tax Journal 37 (December 1984): 462–65; Arthur D. Little, Inc., Development of Methodology for Estimating the Taxpayer Paperwork Burden (Washington, D.C.: Internal Revenue Service, 1988), pp. III–23; James T. Iocozzia and Garrick R. Shear, "Trends in Taxpayer Paperwork Burden," in Internal Revenue Service, Trend Analyses and Related Statistics, 1989 Update (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989), p. 56; Annual Reports of the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service; and a variety of other IRS memoranda
Who is James Payne and what hole did he pull these numbers out of?He based some of his numbers on the flawed Arthur D. Little study from the early eighties. The other's he pulled out a hole. I have his book and it is just a hatchet job.