Forget Paul Ryan, he is ignorant of tax history.
The Income tax started as a flat tax and it always grows into a metastatic cancer.
Since 1913 there have been 5 major tax reforms and each one made the tax code simpler and flatter.
And each time it comes back with a vengeance.
There is a reason that it does this.
It’s called the 16th Amendment which is a de facto business license for the tax gaming industry inside the Beltway.
Since the last major tax reform under Ronald Reagan in 1986, there have been more than 17,000 amendments to the tax code and a quadrupling of the number of tax lobbyists inside the Beltway.
The Tax Favor Trading business is a game between the IRS (Treasury), Congress and the Tax Lobbyists. Often tax lobbyists are former IRS or Congressional or treasury staff. The lobbyist positions with the most salary and perks go to those that held the highest positions before they passed through the revolving doors between playing teams. For example, lobbyists comprise former IRS commissioners, former US Senators etc.
The point is that Ryan is offering or suggesting NOTHING NEW under the Sun in the tax corrupt extortion racket inside the Beltway. His ideas are NOT NEW and have been tried before with no success.
Now we need to ask ourselves WHY in the world would we support someone like Ryan who is peddling the same crap that has come before and has never worked? It’s insane.
People that study the problem comprehensively come to the answer for the tax cancer and its ability to always reappear after a decade or so of remission. It’s called the FairTax and it is brilliant. It is so brilliant that it has the Tax Gamers in panic and they have invested hugely in smearing it much in the same way that the media is now engaged in smearing the Tea Partiers.
Tell Ryan to buy a clue.
In American politics, what works is usually — evolution, not revolution.
People do not want something presented to them in one BIG BANG, but a series of small steps so that they can digest the small changes to see if they work.
THAT is the big mistake with Obamacare.
The same will be true for those who keep harping on the FAIR TAX. It won’t be accepted by most people today. Better to make the change evolutionary. That’s what Paul Ryan’s alternative flat tax is all about for instance. Start with that first, and when people are comfortable with the idea that we can do away with tens of thousands of pages of tax code, then we can talk about the Fair Tax but not until.