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Americans Deserve Better
Income Tax System
by

This first appeared in the
North Hills News Record

In my files, I have a copy of the very first federal income tax Form 1040 from 1913. The form was just one page and there were no income deductions or exemptions. The federal government claimed just 1% of a person's income. If you were one of those rare individuals whose income fell between $50,000 and $75,000, a millionaire by today's standards, you were subjected to a 2% income tax. The highest tax bracket was a measly 6%. And Americans were outraged at the high amounts.

Today, the federal tax code runs to 1,378 pages and related tax regulations add another 6,439 pages. Our tax code is so confusing that when taxpayers call the Internal Revenue Service for help, one out of three callers is given wrong information yet the IRS shares none of the blame when mistakes are made.

You'd think we would've realized something was terribly wrong when the number of Americans employed in the government exceeded the number in the manufacturing sector. The federal government's 1996 bare-bones, belt-tightening, can't-possibly-cut-another-dime budget is $1,600,000,000,000., bureaucratic, paper-shuffling sector became larger than the nation's manufacturing sector.

To put this into perspective, imagine spending $1 million an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It would take you more than 182 years to spend that much. Uncle Sam can do it in one year. Here's an example of your hard-earned tax dollars at work.

	$1.2 million to study the breeding habits of the woodchuck.
	$144,000 to see if pigeons follow human economic laws.
	$160,000 to study if you can hex an opponent by drawing an "X" on his chest.
	$800,000 for a restroom on Mt. McKinley.
	$100,000 to study how to avoid falling spacecraft.
	$6,000 for a document on Worcestershire sauce.
	$57,000 spent by the Executive Branch for gold-embossed playing cards on Air Force Two.
	$150,000 to study the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
	$11 million for a private pleasure boat harbor in Cleveland.
	$500,000 to build a replica of the Great Pyramid of Egypt in Indiana.
	$50,000 to prove that sheep dogs do in fact protect sheep.
	$219,000 to teach college students how to watch television.
	$2,500 to investigate the causes of rudeness, lying and cheating on tennis courts.
	$33 million to pump sand onto the private beaches of Miami hotels.
	$1 million to preserve a sewer in Trenton, NJ, as a historic monument.
	$100,000 to research soybean-based ink.

To fund this bloat, the average person pays more in taxes than for food, clothing and shelter combined. Yet we're so used to the tax code dictating our behavior that people are hyperventilating at the thought of a simple flat tax.

What's so great about a tax code that encourages people to invest money just so they can lose it? Should homeowner's get a tax break and not renters? Is it fair that a married woman pays more in taxes than a single woman? Why does the Widget Corporation qualify for tax breaks and not the Doflinkie Corporation?

We've lived with this ridiculous mess long enough. People need to stop whining about who's going to pay what. There are so many factors that have been distorted for so long it's virtually impossible to predict exact outcomes. A flat tax is about as fair as we can get.