[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 2]
[House]
[Page 2140]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




          DEATH IS LESS COMPLICATED THAN FILLING OUT YOUR 1040

  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, it's been said over and over again that 
nothing in this world is certain except death and taxes. I was a 
practicing physician for over 25 years back in Texas, and I will tell 
you that sometimes death even seems a little less complicated than our 
tax system.
  The complexity of the Tax Code is a consequence of countless 
deductions and exemptions aimed at steering a social agenda, a social 
agenda, when it's supposed to be a Tax Code. The result is a Federal 
law fraught with opportunities for avoiding taxes and loopholes to be 
exploited all at the expense of fellow Americans.
  Everyone is familiar with the problems inherent in our convoluted Tax 
Code. Criticizing the Tax Code is as American as apple pie and 
baseball, and for good reason. Each year Americans spend billions of 
hours and billions of dollars trying to do their best to comply with 
our complicated Tax Code. That's not counting the billions of hours 
they spend complaining about it.
  Madam Speaker, time is precious, and too often we don't have enough 
of it for the personal things we like, such as earning a living, 
raising our families, spending time with friends. And then there is the 
dollars and cents side of this equation where time is money, and 
valuable resources are squandered navigating tax law instead of spent 
growing the economy and creating jobs. Taken together, this is a strong 
prescription for real change in our Tax Code.
  We know what works when it comes to changing the code because we 
caught a glimpse of it when Ronald Reagan cut the code in half in 1986. 
As a result of that reform, the economy grew, revenues increased, and 
jobs were created. I can't think of a better prescription for our 
slowing economy than replicating the reform of the Tax Code on an even 
greater scale.
  So what should we do? The prescription is also pretty simple: flatten 
the tax, broaden the base, and shift the burden away from families and 
small businesses.
  The encouraging news is that we have a practical and effective 
blueprint for making this real change across the board. This blueprint 
is called the flat tax. In 1981, Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka 
proposed a new and radically simple structure that would transform the 
Internal Revenue Service and our economy by creating a single rate of 
taxation for all Americans. Today, several States have implemented a 
single-rate tax structure for their State income taxes, and from Utah 
to Massachusetts citizens are seeing the benefit.
  In Colorado, a single tax rate generated so much income, so much 
revenue, that lawmakers actually reduced the rate less than 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 risen by 250 percent.
  Here in Congress we have several people working on the problem. 
People such as myself; Congressman David Dreier from California, the 
ranking member of the Rules Committee; and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the 
ranking member on the Budget Committee, are all working to establish a 
simple tax rate structure for our United States. Other Members are 
working on it in the other body as well.
  I brought a poster to show you how a faster, flatter, fairer tax 
structure would work, and it's pretty simple. Here you go: Your name, a 
little bit of identification data, write in your income, a line for 
personal exemptions, calculate your deductions for personal exemptions, 
taxable income, calculate the tax by multiplying by a flat rate, 
subtract taxes already withheld, and you're done. What did it take, 30 
seconds? Not very long.
  No more expensive tax attorney bills. Gone are the hours of stressful 
research trying to figure out whether your military service or your 
marital status will adversely affect your return. No more headaches 
trying to determine where the estimated tax payments go.

                              {time}  1900

  A single tax rate structure would eliminate taxes on capital gains, 
taxes on dividends and taxes on savings. Personal savings would 
increase. Businesses would expand and create jobs. Without the heavy 
corporate income tax, which is currently the second highest in the 
industrialized world, companies would have less incentive to offshore 
their headquarters, and more importantly, less incentive to offshore 
their earnings.
  And here is where the all-American principle of freedom comes into 
the prescription: The decision to move to a single rate system would be 
entirely up to the individual or business, not the government. This 
would be an optional program. If somebody has constructed their 
domestic finances or their business finances to maximize earnings under 
the current Federal income tax code, they will be allowed to stay in 
the code. But if you are tired of the shoe box, if you want to fill out 
a single page form and spend the rest of that time with your family or 
on a personal vacation, you are free to do so.
  A flat tax would be much less costly, saving taxpayers more than $100 
billion per year, and reduce tax compliance costs by over 90 percent. 
The resulting increase in personal savings, there is a stimulus package 
that would have an immediate effect on our American economy.
  Recent polling by American Solutions shows that over 80 percent of 
Americans favor an optional one-page tax return with one rate. After 
all, who could complain about making something easier, especially a 
process that comes at such high cost?
  Madam Speaker, this is a very political year. We hear a lot of talk 
about change. You can't turn on the television without hearing talk 
about change. Let's consider how that change could improve the most 
complicated of institutions, the Internal Revenue Service, and more 
importantly, deliver prosperity and return time, return time, to the 
American taxpayer. That is a stimulus package worthy of everyone's 
vote.

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