Repeal and replace federal income tax
In most respects, I find it frightening that Stephen Bannon is the right-hand advisor to President Trump, but I agree with one facet of his pledge to “deconstruct the administrative state” and I hope we are thinking aong the same lines.
As we approach “Tax Day,” April 18 this year, our annual time of pain and Pepto-Bismol, it becomes clear there is no facet of the administrative state as confounding and detrimental as the Internal Revenue Service. The monstrosity that it has become is not due to its employees, but can be laid at the feet of the members of Congress, whose actions over the years have caused it to metastasize into the Frankenstein monster of government, bringing us the Internal Revenue Service Code: tens of thousands of pages of gobbledygook which even those professionals who are paid to interpret it cannot do with consistent accuracy. Rube Goldberg would be proud.
Each year, anxiety-ridden, honest taxpayers waste untold billions of dollars and hours in an effort to gather information they will need to prepare their tax return and then to compile it. Many must pay a significant amount of money to engage a professional tax preparer. Even savvy people who use software programs to file online procrastinate because the process is so complex and confusing, a misery.
If our president truly wishes to aid the “forgotten Americans”, he can and should start with the beleaguered taxpayer by smashing to bits the means by which we assess and collect income taxes. A consumption tax with a refund for lower-income Americans would be best, but in lieu of that, I would adopt the method advocated by then-U. S. Senator Arlen Specter in his ill-fated bid for the presidency, a simple system of income taxation which enables the return to be the size of a postcard.
How wonderful it would be if volunteers no longer had to waste their time aiding taxpayers who are incapable of filing their returns. What a worthy bipartisan endeavor it would be If Congress could be persuaded to eliminate the federal income tax as we know it.
Oren M. Spiegler
Upper Saint Clair