Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America allows tax payers the choice of filing the traditional way ( assuming they love to navigate the maze of deductions and exemptions and determining what or what does not constitute income ), or filing the FLAT way ( the size of a post card ).
IF we vote for politicians who do not support the Ryan alternative (which is a great step, IMHO), we deserve everything we get.
Forget Paul Ryan, he is ignorant of tax history.
The Income tax started as a flat tax and it always grows into a metastatic cancer.
Since 1913 there have been 5 major tax reforms and each one made the tax code simpler and flatter.
And each time it comes back with a vengeance.
There is a reason that it does this.
It’s called the 16th Amendment which is a de facto business license for the tax gaming industry inside the Beltway.
Since the last major tax reform under Ronald Reagan in 1986, there have been more than 17,000 amendments to the tax code and a quadrupling of the number of tax lobbyists inside the Beltway.
The Tax Favor Trading business is a game between the IRS (Treasury), Congress and the Tax Lobbyists. Often tax lobbyists are former IRS or Congressional or treasury staff. The lobbyist positions with the most salary and perks go to those that held the highest positions before they passed through the revolving doors between playing teams. For example, lobbyists comprise former IRS commissioners, former US Senators etc.
The point is that Ryan is offering or suggesting NOTHING NEW under the Sun in the tax corrupt extortion racket inside the Beltway. His ideas are NOT NEW and have been tried before with no success.
Now we need to ask ourselves WHY in the world would we support someone like Ryan who is peddling the same crap that has come before and has never worked? It’s insane.
People that study the problem comprehensively come to the answer for the tax cancer and its ability to always reappear after a decade or so of remission. It’s called the FairTax and it is brilliant. It is so brilliant that it has the Tax Gamers in panic and they have invested hugely in smearing it much in the same way that the media is now engaged in smearing the Tea Partiers.
Tell Ryan to buy a clue.
While I applaud and would support a proposal such as Congressman Ryan’s, it still requires documentation, record keeping, and reporting of one’s income to the government. It should NOT be the government’s, nor anyone’s (except maybe divorce lawyers)business what a person’s income happens to be! A tax system that is not cumbersome, fraught with cheating, simple and already in place would be even better than Ryan’s flat two-tiered approach and that is a national consumption tax. Would politicians approve of this... not likely as it would negate their ability to socially engineer society by utilizing tax law to alter behavior as they presently do with wreck-less abandon!
This system would not only simplify tax collection, but unleash a job and business climate that would explode hiring and production. The uncertainly of today’s tax/health care/regulatory climate is unnecessarily restraining small business growth and large business expansion.
If the politicians would unlock the shackles of the tax code on business this economy would expand exponentially - spending would increase as pent-up demand would be unleashed and the overall revenue to the government would increase.
Now if they would couple that with government reduction in expenditures and control of the deficit, perhaps we can leave this country better than we received it - our children’s children deserve that!