Flattening The Tax: The Flat Tax System

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Flattening the Tax
Imagine if you could file your entire tax return on a postcard. This could be just one benefit of a flat tax system. A flat tax still requires wealthy individuals to pay more than middle or lower class individuals. A flat tax simplifies the tax codes, making the paperwork easy for anyone to fill out and makes the IRS more efficient to run. A flat tax promotes faster economic growth by allocating people to spend more money back into the economy. The federal income tax system should be reformed from the current system to a mere flat rate for everyone, no matter what level income is made.
The flat tax still requires the wealthy to pay more in taxes than the middle and lower classes. Arthur O'Sullivan and Steven Sheffrin said, …show more content…

A simple tax is one that can be easily understood, records easily kept, and payments easily made. Our current system does not hold these traits. The tax code is complicated, records being lost is not far-fetched, and payments take months to be analyzed. An efficient tax is one that the government can collect taxes without excessive time or money. As stated before, it takes many months to process tax returns. According to IRS.gov, their budget in 2016 was almost two billion dollars, which could be greatly reduced if we moved to a flat tax system. A tax should be certain, which means it should be clear to how much tax is owed. In our current system two people who have the same exact tax information and deductions can owe the government two entirely different amounts. In the flat tax system, it would be unquestionable what a person owed in taxes. A tax should be equitable, meaning there is not too much or too little tax burden felt by anyone. In our current system, there is a great deal of burden on the upper class. What this does is lowers the incentive for making more money. Critics of the flat tax will say that the upper class should pay more in taxes because it is ‘unfair' for one person to make so much money. Although if you put yourself into those shoes, working hard your entire life, would you want the government taking a great deal of your hard-earned money and giving back to people who show no incentive to go out and

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