10-20-2004, 12:57 PM
John Wrote:Two words: flat tax.
Throw out all the current tax code. It's 50,000+ pages of garbage is so convaluted that it creates loopholes. So many loopholes that corporations spends billions of dollars of a year to pay for efforts to search these loopholes out and exploit them. I firmly believe that the complexity of our tax code actually manifests malignant corporate governance behaviors in our country. In fact, it's not a new phenonemon, but occurs in many other countries, and especially happened following the privatization of many institutions in Eastern Europe.
The current tax code is ridiculously complex true and it needs to be massively simplified. However, the reason I don't agree with flat tax for the most part is that it has a disproportionate effect on people who don't make much money. If you make $1 million a year, 10% tax doesn't mean anything to you. If you're working poor making $15,000, that $1500 is going to hurt you a lot more.
Of course I don't know how the numbers work out. Maybe we could have a flat tax of 7 or 8 percent and be fine. In the end there does need to be tax code reform.