"Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog Intermittently."
19 April 2011
A century of federal tax rules
I will show my biases here by betting that most of these tax rules were written not to help the government collect taxes, but to help groups of people and corporations avoid taxes.
Another way to look at this is that every section of that code is some bureaucracy that was NOT instantiated. The tax code provides way of implementing policy. Want low cost housing? well you could set up a section of government to administer the building of los cost housing and another to regulate it. Or you could just create tax incentives for private industry to do it for you. Potentially much more efficient if done well. Anyone that talks about "saving" money by removing "tax loopholes" is obligated to explain how they will pay for the administration of the policies now enforced by the tax code they will remove.
The thing to ask is not how many laws there are but how many of them are relevant to you. if that's not changing then it doesn't matter much how long it gets. Now that we have turbo tax to wade through this it's not so hard to figure it out.
Another way to look at this is that every section of that code is some bureaucracy that was NOT instantiated. The tax code provides way of implementing policy. Want low cost housing? well you could set up a section of government to administer the building of los cost housing and another to regulate it. Or you could just create tax incentives for private industry to do it for you. Potentially much more efficient if done well. Anyone that talks about "saving" money by removing "tax loopholes" is obligated to explain how they will pay for the administration of the policies now enforced by the tax code they will remove.
ReplyDeleteThe thing to ask is not how many laws there are but how many of them are relevant to you. if that's not changing then it doesn't matter much how long it gets. Now that we have turbo tax to wade through this it's not so hard to figure it out.