“It’s True As Well AS Witty That A Camel Was A Horse.."

As we rush to complete another tax collection season, one wonders where all the talk of tax reform migrated. The only claimed new twist this revenue-hunting season was a kinder and gentler IRS. I imagine this "lobotimization" of the intimidation mechanism will reduce further the efficiency of tax collection. Apparently, no one is fully capable of interpreting the last simplification of the tax codes. In fact, we will soon hear the annual tales of the grinch who phoned 95 IRS agents and accountants with the same "simple" tax filing question and received 95 different correct answers. According to CPA legend-it was the mean and ruthless, Waco mentality that allowed the IRS to collect most of the taxes it was due. I remember my first encounter with a tax protestor who claimed that he had not paid any taxes for the period 1967-90 in protest against the Vietnam War. He was scheduled to make a presentation to my class and I daydreamed about what he would be like. I imagined a giant frontal brain lobe coupled with his own 40,000-page document to compete with Tax Simplification Act of 1986. Despite my daydreams, a nice man with a normal-sized hat size walked into my classroom and stated the IRS had just realized that he had not paid any taxes for the past 23 years.

It almost makes me yearn to see Steve Forbes pushing his flat tax proposals in the snows of New Hampshire. (Flat Tax Proposals: Armey, Forbes, Kemp and Gramm-- http://www.ctj.org/html/flatsum.htm) You do note that I said almost. Generally, I disapprove of ad hominem rhetorical devices, except in the case of Steve Forbes. However, the notion of just sending in a postcard April 15 and imagining Bill Gates looking for a stamp to do the same procedure had a very positive effect on my psyche.

Ah, but what politician still believes that the tax code should be flat? If it were to be so, then all of the lobbyists would fall off the beltway and have to take up a more esteemed profession such as bank robbery. When I look at the myriad of flat tax proposals (which appears to be a contradiction of terminology), I am sorely tempted to sing a few verses of "Look What They Did To My Tax Ma."

The "flat tax" was first proposed by two Stanford economists, Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka, in their 1983 book "Low Tax, Simple Tax, Flat Tax." The Hall-Rabushka plan, on which the Armey-Shelby bill is based, would replace the current personal income and corporate income tax structure with a two-level tax designed to tax all income exactly once, and at the same rate (in H-R's version, 19 percent).

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