[Svartalfiar]

(A flat tax per se would not necessarily be easier to administer than a progressive one with many rates but few deductions and credits. Everyone can read tax tables.)

Shows how little the author knows about math. There is no possible way a flat tax could not be simpler than a progressive tax, even if the progressive tax had zero deductions/credits. The most basic progressive tax is simply several 'flat' taxes, rates tiered based on income. Hence a long tax table. But a simple flat tax doesn't even need a tax table, all you have to do is multiply one number (income) by another (rate). And done.

[SeekAndFind]

as originally proposed by Steve Forbes in 1996, it wasn’t as simple as multiplying your income by a rate.

Forbes’ proposal was something like this:

* Singles are taxed 20% of any income above $24,000

* Married couples are taxed 20% of any income about $36,000

Of course people still need to determine — WHAT CONSTITUTES INCOME?

And that my friend, is where the IRS still comes into the picture.

[SeekAndFind]

Typo

Married couples are taxed 20% of any income about ABOVE $36,000

[wintertime]

As a former small business owner no it is not done.

There is withholding on all employees both full and part-time. Then there are all the rules on who is an official “employee”. Add to this, determining just exactly what is “income” and there will be thousands of pages of rules on that.

Then add to this the mischief that politicians can do to all those regulations.

Once people wade through all the regulations getting to that magic number of “income” then they can multiply it by a number. By the way, aren't we doing that now?

[semimojo]

I agree that a single-rate flat tax is marginally simpler for the taxpayer - they don’t have to look at a table to determine the tax percentage - but I don’t see how it simplifies the administration of the system.

Most of the complexity in the system is in determining what is income, not in figuring out what rate to pay on that income.