[MrPowers]

Federal income taxes are highly economically inefficient. They create a huge deadweight loss of taxation (productive employees wasting their time helping corporations comply with tax law).

Land and gas are economically efficient to tax. They don't have a big deadweight loss of taxation and create positive incentives.

The Federal government creates tax laws that corporations need to follow. The government added the concept of net operating loss carryforwards to the tax law. Not looks like government officials are complaining about the rules they added to the tax code.

I used to work with the Section 482 tax laws for pricing among multinational enterprises. I found the laws to be complicated and ridiculously impractical, particularly the residual profit split method for valuing intellectual property. Many companies used these laws to shift IP offshore. Politicians are made about the tax structures that were created following their laws.

This isn't a democrats / republicans thing. Both political parties are adding tons of rules to an already bloated US tax code. And congress is constantly upset about the rules they have created.

[Dracophoenix]

>> "Land and gas tax are economically efficient."

Isn't the former already expressed in the form of property tax? And if so, I wouldn't say it's economically efficient. Calculating the value of land/real estate is a blackbox (at least at the local level) only to be known and determined by the taxing entity (i.e government).

[MrPowers]

Land taxes are different than property taxes. Property taxes are on the building, land taxes are just on the land.

Land isn't a perfect tax, still needs to be levied as you mentioned, but it cannot be hidden and incentivizes land owners to use the land for its "highest and best use". There are no complicated depreciation schedules, credits, deductions, etc. for land. It's also highly progressive.