Eliminate the personal income tax. Everyone in personal tax side of HR Block and IRS can find some other career which is useful. Rake the beaches or something.
But this is way too logical for the main political parties to implement.
Rich folks only need so many mansions, yachts and designer sweat pants. This would further shift the burden of taxes onto lower income folks who spend 100% of what they earn.
The IRS could just present a form behind a login with an itemized fully calculated tax return with an accept? "yes" / "no". They already have all the information they need, and already do the work when checking returns for errors.
Taxes are a pain because both, corporate capture of government by powerful tax preparation companies and also because a certain political ideology wants paying taxes to be as unpleasant as possible to make the concept of taxes as unpopular as possible.
This is a feature not a bug of that plan. There’s no amount of tax that’s too low when the answer to “How much do you need to be happy?” is more.
In the vast majority of countries with personal income tax, everything is automatic and individuals don't need to do anything. Political parties in the US have an incentive to make things as complicated as possible to trick people into thinking ideas like a flat tax would be helpful.
Can't reply to a nearby comment, so -- few rich people have taxable personal income because they either don't receive W-2 income or they hire people to structure and pursue the deductions. In other words, yacht owners are rarely rich people and instead are owned by companies (controlled by rich people) so it is a business expense.
