A flat tax would collect more revenue than 85,000 added IRS agents

[Peter1469]

Makes sense so it won't happen.

A flat tax would collect more revenue than 85,000 added IRS agents

One of President Biden’s worst — and most unpopular — ideas is todouble the sizeof the Internal Revenue Service by adding $80 billion to its budget and hiring as many as 85,000 more auditors and agents. The White House predicts this will collect hundreds of billions of dollars in alleged unpaid taxes.

More tax snoops. More audits. This sounds like as much fun as a proctology exam. It’s the kind of proposal only tax accountants, tax lawyers and D.C. lobbyists could love.


Ironically, this proposal comes smack in the middle of the latest scandal at the IRS, with agents illegally turning over private tax return data of millionaires and billionaires to the media. And that comes in the shadows of the Lois Lerner affair during the Obama years, when the agency targeted the tax returns of conservative organizations and donors who happened to oppose Obama’s policies.



What makes the IRS expansion doubly foolish is that the $2.3 trillion Biden tax plan would not just raise personal income, corporate, estate tax and payroll tax rates, but it would add more loopholes and tax shelters to the 30,000-page tax code.


The Biden team keeps referring to this as “tax reform,” but it is the opposite of that. True tax reform should be based on two principles that not long ago were universally accepted by Democrats and Republicans. First, keep tax rates as low as possible to reduce the economic distortions and disincentives of the tax code. Second, broaden the tax base by eliminating the hundreds of special-interest loopholes to make the tax system fairer.


The two of us have long endorsed a flat tax of around 17 percent with minimal special-interest deductions — and, of course, one of us famously ran for president of the United States on that platform. This approach would not just increase the efficiency of the tax code but could increase tax collections and reduce the tax gap.


Almost every IRS commissioner for the last 50 years has confirmed that our income tax system can only function with broad voluntary compliance — unless Biden wants to put an IRS agent in every boardroom and home office in America. Americans are more likely to pay up when they perceive the system is simple, fair and uniformly applied.

Read the rest of the article at the link.

[DGUtley]

Logic and the federal government don't mix.

[Peter1469]

Logic and the federal government don't mix.

Unfortunately true.

[DGUtley]

Unfortunately true.

We've come a long way from the entity that built a dam under budget and before the due date.

[RMNIXON]

Everyone is afraid it will make them pay more and in some well deserved cases it probably would. That seems to be the sticking point for any common sense reform.

[Peter1469]

Everyone is afraid it will make them pay more and in some well deserved cases it probably would. That seems to be the sticking point for any common sense reform.

I would prefer ending income taxes and shift to a national sales tax like the Fair Tax.