January 29, 2009
AS MAVERICK TO CFR...:
Flat Tax, Anyone? (Steve Forbes, 1/29/09, Forbes)
Just a few days before Geithner's embarrassing revelation, the Taxpayer Advocate Service issued its annual report to Congress. (The service is part of the IRS and was designed to help taxpayers resolve complaints with the agency that can't be resolved through normal channels.) The report was an eye-opener as to just how horrifically complicated the code has become. Americans spend 7.6 billion hours a year complying with tax-filing requirements, the equivalent of 3.8 million full-time jobs. The code gets ever more complicated, expanding by about 1,000 words a day--with 500 changes last year alone. Nothing is simple. One example: Congress passed a law allowing beleaguered homeowners to exclude from taxable income home-mortgage debt that is forgiven by lenders. But the form is utterly bewildering, and the law itself is full of nitpicking rules about how much of the forgiven debt can actually be excluded.
Mr. Forbes owed it to his party and his country to run for the Senate from NJ so he could work to pass the flat tax.
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