My opinion exactly.
I should be able to fill out my W4 when I first hire in, and there is no reason I should ever have to re-visit the issue. The table should be simple enough that the employer merely deducts the correct amount, its his problem to get it right, not mine.
The idea that ordinary working people should have to deal with this is silly. The whole April 15th madness is just that, madness. Eliminate the intricacies, and make it the employer's problem to get it right. Working people are not businesses and should not be taxed as if they were. The tax table should be simplicity itself. If your wife works, or doesn't work, it shouldn't affect what is taken from your check. If you have a side business, fine, get an accountant, but your wage earnings from your day job ought have no bearing on your tax from your business. And vice versa.
I want simple. My gross earnings are "x". The percentage is "y". I owe "z". Back of a post card, and not my problem, rather, my employer's problem.
I have lived where that was the case. Its not complicated, in fact, thats the point. Its supremely uncomplicated.
Give me SIMPLE too marron!
Though I doubt we'll get to SIMPLE! any time soon. The problem seems to be that there is no way we are going to take out of Congress' "cold dead hands" the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 as amended. From their point of view, IRC is a marvelous -- and indispensable -- tool of Congressional power with regard to economic reengineering and social change (i.e., redistribution) issues.
The federal income tax is a byzantine, untransparent, and finally unaccountable system of incentives and penalties that treats different citizens differently. This flies in the face of a system of equal liberty and justice, under law.
What IRC as presently constituted has even remotely to do with a citizen's paying his fair share of the national financial burden is totally beyond me.
But I sure am sick of being "manipulated."
Speaking of which, hosepipe recently pointed out that the Federal Reserve System — the folks who happen effectively to run the IRS — was an idea that the Framers of the Constitution would have found perfectly repugnant to what they were trying to accomplish, with the drafting and subsequent ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America. Their model was "liberty," not "bean counting."
The Framers had deep distrust for the idea of a "central bank" -- a "national bank" that had the power to call the shots for the entire financial community.
When the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913, Congress ceded certain of its Article I, Section 8 responsibilities to a private institution not directly accountable to the American people, such as Congress is.
I have reason to believe that transfer of Constitutional powers — specifically, the powers to "borrow money on the credit of the United States," to "coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures" — was, er, unconstitutional. Congress cannot assign its powers to any third party unless its Principal, We the People, approve — via a Constitutional Convention of the People.
Congress is still bound by the original compact with We the People. Though most of our congressmen and senators these days act as if ignorant of that simple, quintessentially American fact.
In short, what was handled by statute should have been referred to the Article V amendment process.
Well it's a mess. But it's always a joy to see my friends.
Thank you oh so much for writing!