Posted by
KsReaganite on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 1:07:19 AM
Another reason I am proud to be a Brownback-er is his fight to replace the disaster of our tax code with a simple, fair, flat tax. One of most powerful economic ideas of our times, championed by conscientious people on both Left (Democrat Gov of CA Jerry Brown) and Right (Republican Congressman Bill Archer and Secretary Jack Kemp), is indeed the flat tax on income. Simply put, the flat tax exempts the first several thousand dollars of income from taxation and then imposes a loophole-free flat rate on anything above that. This allows for the poor to keep most (or all) of their income, earnings that are usually all consumed in basic necessities like food, shelter, medicine, and clothing. On the other hand, the flat tax gets rid of the immense headache, long hours, preparation fees, and frazzled hunt for those little receipts and documents that is a staple of middle class life between January and April each year. As important, this kind of tax closes the loopholes that rich folks have their lobbyists write into law and their lawyers and accountants exploit, come tax time. The more complicated the tax code, the more hidden giveaways for the rich to exploit and their retainers to share.
The United States tax code is 900 percent (yes, nine hundred percent) bigger than the entire Bible!
The opposition will deadly and swift, as it has been in the past. The reason is simple: any idea of a flat tax is lethal to the huge tax bureaucracy (with a flat tax, we will need a very small IRS, if one at all), the tax bar, the accounting industry, and the pork barrel congressmen who love writing tax benefits for big donors. As many Democrats as Republicans will line up to oppose it..after all a Republican tax lawyer wants to send his kid to Harvard just as much as a Democrat tax attorney does.
The flat tax is an idea that is truly precipitous of a David vs. Goliath battle.