[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 59 (Tuesday, April 15, 2008)]
[House]
[Page H2325]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
COMPLEXITY OF TAX CODE
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. BURGESS. Madam Speaker, you know, it is said that nothing in the
world is certain except death and taxes. And I'll tell you, being a
physician in my former life, that sometimes even death is a little less
complicated than our tax system.
The complexity of the tax code is a consequence of countless
deductions and exemptions that are aimed not at collecting revenue, but
steering a social agenda. And the result is a Federal law that is
fraught with opportunities for avoiding taxes and full of loopholes to
be exploited, all at the expense of fellow Americans.
My criticizing the tax code is as American as apple pie and baseball,
and for good reason, because every year Americans spend billions of
hours and billions of dollars, and that's not counting the billions of
hours that we spend complaining about the tax code. Time is money, and
time should be spent growing the economy and creating jobs.
There is a strong prescription for real change in our tax code. We
caught a glimpse of it when Ronald Reagan cut the tax code in half back
in 1986. As a result of that reform, the economy grew, revenues
increased, and jobs were created. The prescription is pretty simple:
Flatten the tax, broaden the base, and shift the burden away from
families and small businesses.
And we do have a practical and effective blueprint, it's called the
flat tax. Back in 1981, Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka proposed a
radically simple structure that would transform the Internal Revenue
Service and our economy by creating a single tax rate for all
Americans. Today, several States have implemented a single rate tax
structure for their State income tax, and from Utah to Massachusetts
citizens are realizing the benefit.
In Colorado, a single rate tax generated so much income that it was
reduced 10 years after its implementation. In Indiana, the economy
boomed after a single rate went into effect in 2003, and since that
time the corporate income tax receipts have grown by 250 percent.
Now, several people in Congress are working on the problem. I have a
bill, H.R. 1040, which is a voluntary flat tax. A companion bill was
introduced by the senior Senator from Tennessee just this past week. We
have bills from David Dreier, the gentleman from California, Paul Ryan
from Wisconsin, all trying to accomplish the same goal, and it is so
simple. You have a single rate, you have a single piece of paper. You
put in your name, just a little bit of identification data, write in
your income, there's a line for personal exemptions, calculate your
deductions from personal exemptions and calculate your taxable income,
multiply it by a flat rate, subtract the taxes already withheld, and
you're done. And what did that take? Not even 30 seconds. No more
expensive tax attorney bills, no more hours of stressful research, no
more headaches. It is much less costly, saving the taxpayers more than
$100 billion per year. And it would increase tax compliance. The
result: Increase in personal savings, and there is a stimulus package
that would have an immediate effect on our American economy.
Recent polling by a group called American Solutions shows that over
80 percent of Americans favor an optional one-page tax return form with
a single rate. Now, we hear a lot of talk about change this year. You
practically cannot turn on the television without some political
commercial talking about change. Well, let's consider how change could
improve the most complicated of institutions, the Internal Revenue
Service. And more importantly, consider how that change could deliver
prosperity and return time, the precious commodity of time, to the
American taxpayer. Now, that's a stimulus package worthy of everyone's
vote.
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