We actually had a flat tax, or at least the best one that our congresscritters could come up with. It was called the Tax Reform Act of 1986. It was flat, but it was not simple.
The reform of ‘86 was both a miracle and revolutionary compared to the preceding decades. Goes to show you how evil our tax system is that it hardly ended up mattering. Not to say things couldn’t have been worse without it, but does anyone anywhere think the current system is good? I mean, at all?
Curring bump. Many credits and deductions survived, and then Bob Dole and other Senate Republicans (Dole was minority leader, then majority leader, for another 10 years after the Tax Reform Act passed) allowed lobbyists to start screwing with the deductions and amortization schedules again, and then Slick got elected and immediately attacked the whole idea, and led us back toward higher marginal "screw-you" rates.