What would it take for the United States to change over to a Flat Tax?
You’re combining two issues here: simplifying the income tax code and changing its structure to be “flat”. I’ll discuss them separately. Simplifying the income tax code is something everyone can get behind, in theory. No one except accountants likes the fact that the code is so complicated you have to hire someone to interpret it for you. But just about every little wrinkle of the tax code was put there for a reason that was popular at the time, like encouraging retirement savings or easing the burden on people paying big medical bills. If you want a massive overhaul, you have to convince people that those little rewards and penalties in the tax code don’t matter, or you have to come up with another way to implement them. Flattening the tax structure is something else entirely. “Flat tax” means that everyone pays the same proportion of their income in taxes, compared to a “regressive tax” where people with lower incomes pay a higher percentage, or a “progressive tax” where people with
