High tax rates prompt people to spend money on the tax lawyers and finance wizards who design those skillful evasions. For the lawyers and the finance guys, this is a boon. But for the overall economy, it’s a significant loss. The money these taxpayers spent on legal fees and complicated financial constructions could have been invested in ways that

“We Mexicans are among the most avid consumers of soft drinks,” notes the novelist David Toscana. “We swig a half-liter per person every day—thanks in part to the multinational beverage companies’ distribution, advertising, and pricing strategies, but also because soft drinks, while not exactly nutritious, are at least (usually) free of germs. In

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, no friend of those in the upper brackets, observed in 1935 that “tax avoidance means that you hire a $25,000-fee lawyer, and he changes the word ‘evasion’ into the word ‘avoidance.’”

Commerce Clearing House, a publisher that tracks developments in the tax laws, has estimated that there are about 420 significant changes to the tax code every year, many of which require new forms, new rules, and whole books of instructions for taxpayers to follow.

If you happen to be browsing through the statute books some restless night, you can find the anti-complexity clause in Subsection IX of subpart (ii) of Section 7803(c)(2)(B) of the Internal Revenue Code.

For the U.S. personal income tax, fixing the whole damn thing means that the whole boatload of exemptions, exclusions, and tax-free income clauses should be jettisoned. If the employer pays part of a worker’s health insurance premium, that’s a fine thing, but the payment should be taxable income to the worker. If a taxpayer decides to buy a

“The irony is that the VAT is probably the ideal tax from a conservative point of view,” wrote the Republican tax expert Bruce Bartlett, who oversaw tax policy in the Treasury Department under the first president Bush. “As a broad-based tax on consumption it creates less economic distortion per dollar of revenue than any other tax—certainly much

Corporate tax revenues are plummeting partly because Congress has larded the corporate income tax with costly preferences and giveaways for corporations, and partly because American multinationals have become so successful at shifting income overseas. Hundreds of millions of dollars—money that might have gone to raising wages, or creating new

When it comes to designing a country’s tax system, the World Bank, the IMF, and the OECD all preach the same sermon, relying on the same fundamental principle. This rule is not particularly complicated; it is easy to understand, although not always easy to implement. In fact, it’s so simple that the economists generally reduce the essential formula