[throw10920]

> Isn't this the fantasy of clean sheet software? 'We'll get rid of all this cruft and make it clean and simple.' But it turns out that the cruft is needed to deal with reality, which is messy rather than the abstract clean-room requirements of our imaginations.

The fantasy is that the software can be made completely clean and simple because there are no edge cases. The reality is that it can be made less terrible by reworking complex parts of the design that were slowly hacked into place over time, and by eliminating technical debt. The fact that the ideal is unobtainable is irrelevant to the fact that there are still concrete, worthwhile, and necessary improvements to be made.

If your perspective on taxes were applied to software engineering, then most large projects would have collapsed by now.

> I can't see how the tax code can be short, having to deal with such a wide range of situations.

Not "short", but short-er than the 74,000 pages that it currently is. And, it's already dealing with a wide range of situations by simply compressing the feature-space down a lot, so one way of making it simpler is to compress it down even more. For instance, you could eliminate a bunch of individual rules that reduce effective taxes for low-income earners, and then just reduce the tax rate at that bracket.

[wolverine876]

Agreed! You'll note that I was responding to the idea of a tax code of only a dozen pages.