| >As we all know, tax preparation is intentionally complicated and hard thanks to lobbying by the tax preparation industry; That ignores the lobbying by other industries for their favorite loopholes: mortgage interest, like kind exchanges, carried interest, R&D credits, and so on. Much of the complexity in the tax code is actually to close the loopholes that taxpayers are always finding, which has nothing to do with the tax prep industry. > Deductions. Honestly pretty much everything should be gotten rid of for personal income other than maybe retirement saving. This ignores the sizable impact of tax credits -- are you proposing those all eliminated also? Currently there is only a deferral of tax on qualified retirement savings, except for Roth IRA earnings (not contributions). There should also be tax free/deferred savings allowed for health care, so that it is not tied only to employment. >We need to annually tax unrealized capital gains; Even on someone's primary residence or other personal-use property? How do you determine fair market value? And it would only make sense if paired with annual deduction of unrealized capital losses. >Tax trusts as we do estates; This makes little sense. For income tax, trusts and estates are already taxed essentially the same. If you are referring to the estate/gift tax, the assets in a trust after death already go through the estate tax regime, why would you do it twice? |