To most Americans, the United States tax code has become a vast and confounding puzzle. In 1940, the instructions to the form 1040 were about four pages long. Today, they have ballooned to more than a hundred pages, and the form itself contains more than ten schedules and twenty worksheets. The complete tax code totals about 2.8 million words—about four times the length of War and Peace. The author of this book maintains that America's tax code has become a tangle of loopholes, paperwork, and inconsistencies—a massive social program which fails tests of simplicity and fairness. More important, ... More

To most Americans, the United States tax code has become a vast and confounding puzzle. In 1940, the instructions to the form 1040 were about four pages long. Today, they have ballooned to more than a hundred pages, and the form itself contains more than ten schedules and twenty worksheets. The complete tax code totals about 2.8 million words—about four times the length of War and Peace. The author of this book maintains that America's tax code has become a tangle of loopholes, paperwork, and inconsistencies—a massive social program which fails tests of simplicity and fairness. More important, our tax system has failed to keep pace with the changing economy, creating burdens and wastes of resources that weigh our nation down. The author offers a solution in which most Americans pay no income tax at all, and those who do pay tax enjoy a far simpler tax process, arguing that this is possible without decreasing government revenues or removing key incentives for employer-sponsored health care plans and pensions.