Comment by KPGv2
7 days ago
> Get rid of sales tax, property tax
The very first things you list aren't related to the IRS at all. They're local and state taxes, and to get rid of those would require a radical rewriting of the Constitution itself. Not to mention it would destroy all fire department, county hospital, school, city park, state park, etc. funding.
Of course they're not, but this is how you smell someone that doesn't really want to enforce paying taxes, but just wants to evade them as much as possible.
How quickly people show their colors.
I don't think that's fair. The US has so many administrative layers with taxing powers - federal, state, county, and municipal, and in many cases administrative bodies also charge massive filing fees, and courts charge large fees to finance themselves because they're consistently under-funded by legislatures.
So Americans get taxed a lot at many different levels of activity. The cognitive load of having so many different points of taxation is annoying and exhausting to a lot of people. It makes household budgeting a lot more work than it really needs to be.
But it is this way because of the Constitution
They maybe we should change that and have a simpler system with much less complexity. Dismissing people who object to the painful complexity of the US tax regime as 'evaders' is npt insightful or helpful.
> maybe we should change that and have a simpler system with much less complexity
Wholeheartedly agree, but I see the root cause of the issue being income tax itself. As soon as you tax income, you'll go down and endless rabbit hole of what's fair to tax, how much, what kind of income, investment income vs wage income, percentage vs flat rate, etc...
That gave us the mess we have.
I like the idea of consumption tax exclusively (would require an amendment). You're taxed on your purchases.
It's easy to drive behavior (more tax on some things... tax on cigarettes, yachts and private jets) and easy to make more fair (exclude grocery staples).
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> The cognitive load of having so many different points of taxation
What in the world. The cognitive load of just paying the bill that was automatically calculated by someone else?
FIT is like the only thing that should occupy your brain at all, and I agree that in a sane world it'd just be a tax imposed on us with no deductions or credits, meaning no one even has to think about it.
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