If you get rid of all these giveaways and loopholes and deductions and credits, then you can sharply lower the rates.

In the United States, unlike any other advanced democracy, money really talks. Our Supreme Court has said that spending money on politicians is a form of free speech. No other court has said that.

You also get a deduction in America for taking a night school course, growing sugarcane, moving to a new city for a job, replanting a forest, insulating the attic, destroying old farm equipment, employing Native Americans, commuting to work by bicycle - but only if the bike is regularly used for a substantial portion of travel - or buying a plug-in hybrid sports car, or buying a recreational vehicle. I mean there are hundreds of them, and most of them are nuts.

The U.S. has the most complicated and difficult tax system in the world; we've made it hard to file and pay taxes.

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.

Our 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.

The 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.