100 Million Unnecessary Returns: A Simple, Fair, and Competitive Tax Plan for the United States; With a New Introduction
On May - 29 - 20102 COMMENTS
Product Description
To most Americans, the United States tax code has become a vast and confounding puzzle. In 1940, the instructions to the form 1040 were about four pages long. Today they have ballooned to more than a hundred pages, and the form itself contains more than ten schedules and twenty worksheets. The complete tax code totals about 2.8 million words—about four times the length of War and Peace. In this intriguing book, Michael Graetz maintains that our tax code has bec… More >>
This book is a pleasure to get through and does an excellent job assessing the current state of tax reform. His competitive tax plan makes quite a bit of sense too. Shifting a good portion of federal revenue to a VAT takes over 150 million individuals off the IRS rolls and simplifies the entire system. I worry that the implementation process would be too complicated to reap the benefits of the simpler system, and that this plan lacks the proper advocates in Congress, but that does not mean you shouldn’t read this book and understand his plan. The VAT is a tried and true system throughout the EU, and could help the US in numerous ways.
Rating: 5 / 5
Michael Graetz makes tax policy almost enjoyable. Graetz never forgets that the tax system’s primary purpose is to raise the money needed to finance the government services that the nation wants in the least harmful way. Or, as the French economist Colbert put it, “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” Graetz provides a realistic assessment of our current tax structure and deftly identifies the failings of faddish proposals, such as the “fair tax” and the “flat tax.” His proposal to reduce the number of people required to pay income tax and to add a value-added tax to our nation’s fiscal arsenal deserves serious consideration by conservatives and liberals alike.
Paul N. Van de Water
Rating: 5 / 5