The Obama administration is open to any possible reform of the U.S. tax code “that’s going to simplify, make it more efficient and generate revenue,” top White House economist Austan Goolsbee said Thursday.
Goolsbee was speaking to a YouTube roundtable two days after President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address that he wanted to pursue ideas for tax reform.
Any type of tax simplification will go nowhere, how will the super weathy hide money, thats the job of hi-powered accountants. They find the loopholes..
This will be like trying to convince Rupert Murdock of fox news that global warming is a scientific fact! of course big oil doesn’t want anyone to believe in global warming, that undermines the entire oil industry.
I heard a statistic that over a million people in the United States work in the tax industry. You make things very simple and you can bank that 60-75% of those people are no longer needed, hence more people out of a job. I would hope that someone is modelling out the balance between another million folks out of a job with the benefits of simpler tax rules. The fact this is supposed to be “budget neutral” – not generating any new income, makes me think that the only benefit of this is on the downside. Unwinding the model of making up a bunch of arbitrary rules (tax laws, for example) and then having an economy of people who exist to help individuals and corporations comply with these laws (tax accountants, attorneys, corporate tax folks, etc) would be very, very painful.