I worked for about three months for the IRS, in collections no less.  My second least favorite job.  I hated it and left.  The first worst was working in a sheet metal plant and it wins that contest by dint of being utterly filthy in the physical realm.  Telling crying taxpayers you are not going to sell their children into slavery for back taxes sucks.

Our tax system is really confusing.  There are all sorts of maneuvers one can make if one hires an astute accountant adept in taxes which will improve one’s tax position.  I would do this if I had money and I worked in that system.  You’d think I might have a clue but our system is really confusing.

One thing you will hear lauded from time to time is a flat tax rate.  They may even claim this will somehow make our tax system simpler.  That is not likely to happen because those who propose flat taxes rarely also propose removing the host of deductions which create the bulk of the confusion.

Flat taxes are not fair in any objective sense.  They are sold as fair by dint of being the same percentage.  Let’s be clear though.  Ten percent of ten thousand dollars is a thousand dollars.  When you are making ten grand a year and lose one of those grands things have suddenly become a lot less grand.  By contrast when you make ten million each year and you lose one of those million, meh, whatever.

Never mind that the very wealthy earn most of their money through rentier methods (non-labor related income) such as capital gains (which in turn is taxed much lower than labor-styled income—wages for instance).

I would like to see some major reforms (such as eliminating capital gains for single-home home owners where said home is valued at less than a million dollars tied to a capital gains tax increase), but I’m always pie-in-the-sky like that.

This excellent article came to my attention recently.   I highly recommend the article as it is a good read and the author does an excellent job of describing one of the many confusing aspects of our tax system.