Few adjectives in the English language arrive on our doorsteps with as little freight as “simple.” Simple is good. Simple is welcome. Simple almost always makes us exhale with relief (assembling that Ikea desk is simple, really). Even the one negative connotation, that of simple-mindedness, produces a stock response of sympathy. After all, Lennydidn’t mean to kill those mice or strangle that poor girl. He was just . . . simple. So who can argueagainst a simpler tax code? I can. I hereby wave the flag of complexity, and I do so proudly.
Herman Cain has given us 9-9-9 . This week sometime, Rick Perry is going to announce the details of his plan for a flat tax . He keeps nattering on about simplicity. He wants to “scrap the 3 million words of the tax code,” he snarls, to great harrumphs of approval.
We don’t yet have the details on Perry’s plan, but it will certainly be, because all flat-tax proposals are, a gussied-up way of stealing money from the working and middle classes and handing it to the rich. Why is all too straightforward. Have a look at this list of current marginal tax rates. You’ll see that rates change at various levels, which everyone knows, but what everyone forgets is that even if you make more, within any given income range, you pay that rate. If you make$100,000, you are in the 28 percent bracket, but you’re not paying 28 cents on every dollar you earned, which is what most media shorthand would lead you to believe. You’re paying in accordance with the rate scale in the above link, each chunk of salary taxed at the appropriate marginal rate.
This means that what a person actually pays can be hard to figure, but this calculator gets us most of the way there. A$50,000 earner (married filing separately, as all these examples will be) pays 17.25 percent. A$100,000 earner pays 22 percent. A $250,000 earner pays 29 percent. A$500,000 earner pays 32 percent. And a $1,000,000earner pays 33.5 percent.Remember—I told you I was celebrating complexity!—these dollarfigures are taxable income, i.e., after deductions.
If, however, there were an 18 percent tax on income—most flat-tax proposals are in that range—everyone would pay, duh, 18 percent. According to the above calculator, the 18 percentrate is paid now by a person whose taxable income is $56,000. So under an 18 percent flat tax, everyone above$56,000 would be gettinga tax cut. And obviously, the farther away from$56,000 you go, the larger, in real and percentage terms, your cut. And I hope the obverse has already occurred to you: Yes, the lower earners would be in for sizable tax increases. For example, a$25,000 earner would go from paying 13.3 percentto the said 18 percent, which is a 35 percent increase, while our$1,000,000 earner gets a 46 percent decrease. And Kim Kardashian, forget about it. She’d pay a fraction of her current rates.
It is blatant highway robbery. But as you can see from the above paragraphs, it’s hard to explain. And it’s hard to explain why progressivityin the tax code is good policy, but it is. Even if you reject the moral argument that Kardashian should give more back to society than a waitress, there is the very practical argument that a progressive income tax code makes up for other more regressive forms of taxation—the payroll tax and sales taxes, notably. The waitress pays payroll taxes on her entire income, while a $1 million earner pays it on just one-tenth of his (roughly), and of course the waitress spends far more of her income on sales taxes. The income tax helps even these things out, as has long been understood.
This is precisely where “simplicity” comes in so handy for supply-siders and others who want to steal from the middle class. Simple has to be good. A tax return the size of a postcard! Imagine! How awesome life would be.
Not. We need complexity in the tax code. Conservatives want you to believe that the tax code is complex because liberals and bureaucrats love nothing more than sitting around all day making rules. “Let’s see,” the liberals and bureaucrats say to one another in this dystopic vision, “what can we do today to make a future Steve Jobs waste a lot of time on red tape instead of tinkering around in his garage like he should be?”
That ain’t how it works. The tax code is complex for three reasons. First, it’s complex because of the power of certain lobbies—and here I would agree with some conservative health-care economists that, for example, we’d be better off with no health-care deduction, and no employer-sponsored health care, period. Second, it’s complex because millions of Americans have over the decades dreamed up endlessly inventive ways of cheating on their taxes, and the government has to try to catch them. And third, and mostly, it’s complex because society is complex. If we were starting a country of a few hundred thousand people from scratch, withminimal income disparities and other equities that America doesn’t have (national health care), a flat tax might be okay.

But in thereal context of the UnitedStates, it is an obscene transfer of wealth. Rick Perry may be such a bubblehead that he doesn’t understand all this, but you can be sure that the people who sold him on the flat tax understand it.
Simplicity is for simpletons: A handy slogan for the ruling classthat wants more of your money. Don’t be that simple.

You know, sometimes I want to read your stuff but I never can. Walls of text are just too hard to read.

How about 0% tax? NOW THAT'S SIMPLE!

RON PAUL 2012!!!!

I am sure you don't mean 0%... maybe 0% income tax but not 0% tax. A government can't run if it gets 0 money.

CONGRESS CAN'T SPEND WHAT THEY CAN'T STEAL!

Tarrifs and levies on imports and exports "for profit", State taxes don't apply (of which a % goes to the fed.....) There are also "usary" taxes (which people are only BEGINNING to realize there are) on EVERYTHING!

The taxes RP wants to abolish (income tax, and all the unlawful ones the FED put in place and inforce on the people thru the IRS) make up only about 3% or less of our national tax base! It SIMPLY means, more money for the individual the banks (FED) are stealing from us now!

The usary taxes are the biggest deterrant to a flat tax which is noted in the OP. FLAT TAXES ARE NOT GOOD FOR THE AVERAGE AMERICAN, BUT GREAT FOR THE RICH AND THE BANKS!

That extra $100 to $300 that usually comes out of your paycheck every payday....when there were jobs...... would be a nice boost to the economy, not the banks it goes to now!

NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION!

Dude, your articles are good, but see how much easier they are to visually digest when they're in paragraphs rather than just a chunk of garbled text.

C'mon, most of us learned how to do it in fourth grade, don't be lazy.

Rick Perry’s “File Your Taxes On a Postcard” Scheme

http://www.infowars.com/rick-perrys-file-your-taxes-on-a-postcard-scheme/

Every time I see someone talk about income taxes, they completely ignore FICA and Medicare which are separate from income tax. A flat rate tax merges these two taxes with the income tax, thereby dropping the effective tax rate for much of the middle class.

Meanwhile, the wealthy who earn most of their money from investments avoid paying the full amount of the three taxes because they find the loopholes. If all forms of income - whether it be capital gains, salary, or tips - were required to be reported under a flat rate income tax, then many wealthy individuals would have to pay more dollars in tax, especially because of FICA and Medicare.

Some talk about tax rates after deductions, but does that include all of their income? There is a reason why execs look for stock options, expense accounts, and company perks: to avoid paying taxes. No FICA or Medicare are paid on these "incomes".

Last year, tax revenue was just enough to cover mandatory expenses at the federal level. All discretionary spending was in the red. How did this happen? Because the government kept borrowing from Social Security and Medicare funds in the past just to pay for over-budget spending. Now with the country's largest generation retiring, the Social Security and Medicare obligations are greater than ever, but the money isn't there: the government spent it to fund other portions of the budget. This is having a heavy impact on the federal budget and our government's debt.

The secret to fixing the federal tax code lays in the mandatory spending portion of the federal budget. It is the largest chunk. Many citizens are not going to let go of Social Security and Medicare. They paid into it for decades so that funding would be there for when these same citizens reached an age when they would need it. However, the government betrayed them by spending those funds. Now we need to raise the revenue each year just to meet these obligations, which is not how the system was originally designed.

So, when discussing tax percentages, please include FICA and Medicare in your figures. I generally make $25,000/year, but my taxes including these two taxes is about 21%, not 13% or even 18%. So under a flat rate tax, my taxes would be the same or less. On the other hand, taxable income for FICA is capped at $106,800 - the top 1% do not pay a proportionate amount because of this. Hence, the lower and middle classes are the primary contributors to the single largest portion of the the federal budget. But since this is not including in income tax figures, it is constantly overlooked. A single flat tax would force the wealthy to pay a larger share of FICA than they do now as private citizens, while removing that burden from businesses at the same time.

This is why I hate spin doctors...

Truth is, under the G. H. W. Bush, G. Bush, and Obama, taxes on the wealthy have been the lowest since 1931. Each of those three have been mired in a poor economy and struggled to pull out of it. Even Reagan taxed the wealthy at a rates of 38.5% and 50%. From 1965 to 1981, the top tax bracket was 70%. From 1946 to 1963, the top bracket was taxed 91%. In fact, the average tax rate for the top bracket over the past 99 years is 59.38%. Is it any wonder why people complain the wealthy do not pay enough taxes? The rates they are paying now are well below the historical average, and the lowest rates since the Great Depression have only been met by an economic downturn. Meanwhile, higher taxes on the wealthy in recent times have been marked by strong economies in the 80s and 90s.

So when arguing for complexity, perhaps one needs to truly understand where the problem lies first. After all, complexity only serves to confuse the masses....to wear them down until they decide to ignore it rather than understand it. Genius is in making the complex simple by removing everything unnecessary and impertinent. The tax codes have become a Rube Goldberg contraption for what should be a simple job.

As for zero tax....read up about the Articles of Confederation and why they were scrapped.

And income tax accounting for only 3% of all federal revenue is absolutely absurd. Where are you getting your numbers from?

According to actual receipts, personal income tax currently accounts for 50% of all federal revenue.

Corporate income tax accounts for 15%.

Employment taxes (FICA, Medicare/Medicaid) make up just 31.5% despite requiring TRIPLE that just for self-sufficient funding. (This is the single largest shortfall within the entire federal budget, and its taxes exist for the sole purpose of making the programs self-sufficient.)

Excise Taxes: 2%
Estate Taxes: 0.9%
Gift Taxes: 0.07%

Given the real data, the federal budget couldn't be balanced without the income tax. Whether it's "for profit" taxes or not, one way or another the taxes ultimately comes out of our own pockets. So rather than creating smoke screens or being charged extra by some big company to cover the business taxes, we might as well just have just one tax - the personal income tax - that we pay directly to the government.

Total taxation in percentage to the GDP is 23.xx %

Personal income tax is under 3% of that figure...

I'm trying to paste the link or scale and it won't let me! I'm looking for another site that will.

Here's a chart of actual average income tax rates (percentage paid) by income level from 2009, courtesy of the IRS. This is the most recent set of statistics from them. This does not include any other taxes, like FICA or Capital Gains. It's just income tax.

$1 under $5,000......................0.15%
$5,000 under $10,000.................0.41%
$10,000 under $15,000................0.55%
$15,000 under $20,000................1.26%
$20,000 under $25,000................2.07%
$25,000 under $30,000................2.87%
$30,000 under $40,000................4.03%
$40,000 under $50,000................5.26%
$50,000 under $75,000................6.78%
$75,000 under $100,000...............8.13%
$100,000 under $200,000..............11.78%
$200,000 under $500,000..............19.48%
$500,000 under $1,000,000............24.23%
$1,000,000 under $1,500,000..........25.17%
$1,500,000 under $2,000,000..........25.47%
$2,000,000 under $5,000,000..........25.65%
$5,000,000 under $10,000,000.........25.25%
$10,000,000 or more..................22.40%

This same data places the personal income tax at 6% of the GDP. Meanwhile, the Federal budget is 23% of the GDP. Roughly 10% of that 23% is deficit spending, hence placing personal income tax at half of all Federal tax revenue.

Therefore, your math is wrong.

And CONGRESSMAN Paul is one of those Theifs!

Rick Perry is a nut job...
he gets in office and I'm going to Canada!!!

Obama is a nut job.