Sunday, April 12, 2020

Let's Reform the Federal Income Tax Code




I thought I had finished up my taxes.  I fed all the returns into TurboTax, ran the return checker, printed out the return, found envelopes and addressed them, wrote the checks.  Whew.  So I go and get the mail.  Damn, another K1 form in today’s mail.  I will have to punch that in and then reprint to whole return.
We could make the whole tax scene better with a go thorough tax reform. 
  1. Repeal the entire tax code.  And get rid of the huge stack of court rulings supporting the existing code.
  2. New tax code must be less than 100 pages.
  3. The tax code exists to raise the money the Feds need to operate.  It is not to encourage electric cars, windmills, solar roofs, home ownership, teaching school, or greenie plans to throw us back to the Stone Age.
  4. Income is money you made.  Doesn’t matter how you made it, or where you made it.  Income is income.  We scrap capital gains which exists to give stock holders a break.  You make some money trading stocks, that’s income.
  5. Foreign companies get treated the same as domestic companies.  Get rid of the K1 schedule and have them file a 1099 just like domestic companies.
  6. No deductions for anything except charitable giving.  Contributions to the Republican Party, the Democratic Party and the NRA are deductible. 
  7. We have three tax brackets, one for the truly poor, one for the really rich, and one for average working stiffs.  Tax rate for the truly poor is 5%; they have to pay something to teach them how much taxes hurt.  Tax rate for the average working stiff is 17%.  I have been doing taxes for 60 years, and every year when the 1040 is ready to file I wind up paying 17%.  And tax rate for the really rich ought to be double that, 34%.  Congress must reset the breakpoints (how much income puts you in which class) every 4 years.
  8. No more “foundations” which allow the really rich to dodge a lot of taxes.

Feel free to post your favorite tax reforms.


No comments: