From: EvMick@aol.com Date sent: Sun, 6 Jun 1999 19:52:29 EDT Subject: Flat Tax. To: extropians@extropy.com Send reply to: extropians@extropy.com
>
> Just a little tidbit i dug up...now tell me again how our government is so
> smart...(so smart it can tell us who can or can not own guns... or who can or
> can not make other decesions...) and that we should respect it and know that
> it holds our best interest at heart...
>
>
> According to the March 14, 1999, edition of Doug Fiedor’s newsletter Heads
> Up, the IRS publishes 480 tax forms and 280 forms to explain them, sending
> out eight billion pages of forms and instructions each year which, if laid
> end to end, would circle the earth 28 times. Nearly 300,000 trees are cut
> down each year to produce the paper on which IRS forms and instructions are
> printed. Each year, Americans devote 5.4 billion hours complying with the tax
> code, which is more time than it takes to build every car, truck and van
> produced in the United States. The cost of complying with the tax system
> totals about $200 billion annually, or $700 for every person in America. The
> corporate income tax costs the economy more in lost production than it raises
> in revenue for the Treasury. Dale Jorgenson, the chairman of the Economics
> Department at Harvard University, found that each extra dollar the government
> raises through the current system costs the economy $1.39.
>
> Doug gives details of a bill before Congress for replacing this monstrosity
> with a flat tax of 17% on all income, with a family of four paying no tax on
> the first $35,400 of their income. This is from the same newsletter that was
> talking about the sellout of strategic defense technology to China a year
> before the general media picked it up.
>
What does the one have to do with the other? So there exists a
blosted bureaucracy. That doesn't mean that the results of court
cases and competency hearings cannot be sent to a single
accessible file. In fact, with today's technology, the creation and
maintainence of such a registry should be surpassingly simple.