Three decades after the passage of the 1986 reforms, the U.S. tax code is a mockery of the BBLR principle. It is stuffed to the roof with loopholes that narrow the tax base and thus force tax rates higher. If we are to fix our complicated and inequitable tax code again, Americans will have to agree—as we did three decades ago—to purge many of those

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.

a deduction or an exemption from income gives a larger tax benefit to the rich, which he considered unfair favoritism. A tax credit, in contrast, gives the same benefit to all taxpayers.

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

“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 le

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.

An American couple bringing in the median family income—about $55,000 per year—and taking the standard deduction will pay about 15% of their annual earnings in personal income tax, another 6.5% in Social Security tax, another 2.9% for the Medicaid tax, and roughly 5% in state income tax. In addition, an average American family will pay 5% to 10% of

The Panama Papers indicated that the law firm created some 214,000 shell corporations—legal entities that had no employees, no officers, and no corporate activity except to serve as a clandestine repository for the money of wealthy tax dodgers. Sometimes, the firm put the money into “charities” or “foundations,” which can also be used to hide funds

Countless other countries like ours—advanced, high-tech, free-market democracies—have found ways to collect the tax revenues they need without imposing long hours of tedious labor and large tax-preparer fees on their citizens. Their parliaments and their tax collectors are no smarter than their counterparts in the United States. The difference is,