Americans spend about 6 billion hours a year collecting the data and filling out the forms. We spend $10 billion to H&R Block and other preparers. And on top of that, $2 billion in tax preparation software, which still takes hours of work. It's outrageous the burden we put on people, and guess what, you go to Europe, you go to Japan, it's 15 minutes and costs nothing.
T.R. ReidThe Value-Added Tax, a sales tax that applies at every level of business transactions, is an easy tax for governments to collect, and a hard tax to evade.
T.R. ReidOur tax code becomes so absurdly complex every 32 years that we have no choice but to scrap it and re-write. The 32-year period is up in 2018. So the time has come. History tells us that we're going to produce a fairer, simpler tax code by 2018.
T.R. ReidThe U.S. has the most complicated and difficult tax system in the world; we've made it hard to file and pay taxes.
T.R. ReidThe higher the rate, the more interest there is in avoiding the tax. Either you move or you shift your profits overseas, as American corporations have proven very good at doing.
T.R. ReidIt was an easy thing to tax for a young country. And then gradually we moved to property taxes, manufacturing taxes, and the income tax was the answer to a populist demand: Let's go after the rich guys. We got into World War I, and they raised the rates and started taxing the rich. Then we got into World War II, and that's when they taxed everybody, because they just needed more revenue.
T.R. ReidMortgage is one of the most popular deductions. It costs the Treasury about $103 billion a year. Now that's money we could use to treat wounded veterans or reduce the deficit or fill the border. Instead, we give it a subsidy to homeowners, and it goes mainly to the richest homeowners in America, because only one third of Americans itemize their deductions. It doesn't work. Many countries have gotten rid of the mortgage interest deduction. Almost all of them have higher homeownership rates than we do.
T.R. Reid