Really? There's 74,000 pages to describe a simple progressive tax rate?
There's about 10 pages describing the tax rates, and 73,990 pages describing what is and isn't income. Talk to any business owner about simply deciding what is and isn't a valid business expense. There's always something the IRS can niggle on.
As long as you have an income tax, the question of deciding what is and isn't income will get hairy - there's too much money involved for it not draw lots of lawsuits and pay lots of lobbyists for exemptions and special clauses.
The income tax is what needs to go.
“The income tax is what needs to go.”
YUP! That is why I support the FairTax.
I rely pretty heavily on Milton Friedman's caution about going to a "consumption" tax becasue of the potential pitfalls, mainly the "value-added" tax feature ("VAT") which would be a disastrous complexity and opportunity for almost unlimited government intrusion into business operations. The first thing that needs to be decisively dealt with is the 16th Amendment: if it's valid, forget it, it won't be repealed. But if it could in fact be proven in court that the amendment was never ratified, then the states could begin working on nullifying an illegal and invalid "amendment."
If the 16A proved to be legally bogus, then we're back to Art I Sec 9 Clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution which only allows taxation based on proportion of (state?) census, which sounds like a flat rate, but not an income tax. A tax based on proportional population based on the census could mean no income OR consumption tax - simply a tax based on proportion of population based on the census.