tax reform

We should consider the following:
1) abolish the federal income tax

Okay. Take a deep breath and keep reading:

1) Federal Sales Tax. We should never consider doing this unless we abolish federal income taxes completely. I suggest we do so. Set this at 20% and exempt basic (non-luxury) food items. The studies I can find indicate that it would take around 14% to replace, dollar-for-dollar, the money brought in by the income tax. This would have the benefit of setting the federal government's "income" to the economic activity of the people. This would eliminate the IRS as we know it, eliminate all the clauses whereby the government can jail a citizen for not obeying tax laws perfectly, and cause a giant upheaval in the tax-preparation industry. Nonetheless, regardless of the pain, this would be a giant plus for the country as a whole. Plus, it would eliminate the entire federal income-tax code and replace it with a tax that would be paid whenever we bought things. Goodbye, IRS; goodbye, overcomplicated tax code; goodbye, government jailing people for not being able to accurately follow the 1000s of pages of code (or even figure out the index to it, assuming an index exists somewhere).

This would also share the reality of supporting the government across all income levels. It would also hit the rich squarely, as the more items you buy, the more pricey the items, the more you'd pay in federal sales tax. It would put a premium on making people THINK about their expenditures more than the current system does.

Want a progressive tax code? Whoever buys the most, pays the most. How is that not the fairest of all systems?

It could be argued to retain a smidgen of the IRS and a corporate tax code. For now, let's say that, if we did that, we could exempt businesses with under, say, 25 employees; and set a flat rate with no exemptions of 10% for all companies above that limit.

Ultimately, our goal with the tax code (whatever its form) should be:
1) minimize the situations that the code creates whereby the government jails its citizens for not obeying it's edicts (or being able to follow the labrynthian nature of the laws).
2) minimize the bloat. KISS -- keep it simple, stupid. That means simple in terms of its math, but also in terms of its organization and regulatory complexity.
3) ideally, a system as above would be fairer, in that the poor spend less (and therefore spend less on a federal sales tax) and the rich spend more (and therefore pay more in that tax system). When the economy does well, the government's coffers do well -- when the people are hurting, so is the government. That relationship should exist, and under the current system when the people are hurting... it's often the government's fault, or the government's obscenely-complicated systems only make things worse, and usually in an inefficient and unnecessarily costly way. The current relationship is antagonistic; the no-federal-income-tax, federal-sales-tax-instead system would be more friendly and therefore more healthy in a civic sense.