Ready for a new year and another bout with the Internal Revenue Service, deductions, exemptions, pens and pencils, calculators, receipts, 1040s, W-2s, accountants, Quicken, TurboTax, and more? If you’re like most Americans, that laundry list of income tax jargon, paraphernalia, professionals and their fees is enough to set your head spinning — and even if it isn’t, the thought of paying Uncle Sam your annual dues will certainly do the trick. America’s tax code needs reform, plain and simple. The current tax system discourages saving, investment, and entrepreneurship. It’s a drag on …
U.S. taxpayers will spend $431 billion just complying with the tax code this year, according a new study by Arthur Laffer, Wayne Winegarden, and John Childs. That’s not money collected by the Internal Revenue Service; that figure represents just the value of the time taxpayers will spend keeping records and filling out tax forms, and the cost of paying professional tax preparers to do it for them, plus the cost of the bureaucracy needed to administer the tax code. That $431 billion amounts to 30 percent of the total of income taxes …
Two-time former Estonia Prime Minister Mart Laar visited The Heritage Foundation today, extolling the benefits the flat tax brought to his country. First passed in Estonia in 1994, Laar cited two immediate benefits he witnessed when the flat tax was implemented: First, government revenues went up as the simplicity of the new system “killed” tax avoidance; and second, growth skyrocketed. Indeed healthy economic growth has been a staple of the Eastern European countries that adopted the flat tax since the fall of the Berlin Wall, including Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and …
