{"id":401,"date":"2006-04-17T09:02:54","date_gmt":"2006-04-17T17:02:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/?p=401"},"modified":"2006-04-17T09:02:54","modified_gmt":"2006-04-17T17:02:54","slug":"tax-day-post-a-criticism-of-the-flat-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/2006\/04\/17\/tax-day-post-a-criticism-of-the-flat-tax\/","title":{"rendered":"Tax Day Post: A criticism of the flat-tax"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/vance\/flat-tax-folly.html\">This article<\/a> isn&#8217;t great, but it&#8217;s still fairly interesting to read someone criticizing the flat tax idea as something that&#8217;s not radical enough.  The only reason I felt the article was blogworthy were a number of points\/quotations made near the beginning.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The US tax code \u00e2\u20ac\u201d with its &#8220;nine million word mountain of verbiage&#8221; \u00e2\u20ac\u201d is so complex and &#8220;littered with impenetrable passages&#8221; that a fictional tax return given by Money magazine to forty-five tax preparers resulted in forty-five different calculations of the correct amount of tax due. This is not surprising since IRS employees (Forbes says that there are 97,440 of them) don&#8217;t even give the same answers to tax questions. Forbes mentions a 2003 Treasury Department study which found that callers to the IRS toll-free help lines &#8220;gave the wrong answers to tax-related questions more than 25 percent of the time.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Regardless of one&#8217;s take on an appropriate level of taxation, I&#8217;d assume most people agree the current tax system is amazingly screwed up.  Stats like that are almost unsurprising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This article isn&#8217;t great, but it&#8217;s still fairly interesting to read someone criticizing the flat tax idea as something that&#8217;s not radical enough. The only reason I felt the article was blogworthy were a number of points\/quotations made near the beginning. The US tax code \u00e2\u20ac\u201d with its &#8220;nine million word mountain of verbiage&#8221; \u00e2\u20ac\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-libertarian"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5TCqO-6t","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}