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.

If you ask any economist, they'll tell you all the mortgage interest deduction does is raise the price of the house. So a couple is out looking at the house, they say, "Oh, we love this house, but we couldn't make the monthly payment." And the realtor says, "Yeah, but you're going to get a tax break." So people pay more than they would otherwise. You take a loss even though you're making a gain.

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.

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.

Mortgage 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.

President Trump repeatedly says that "America is the highest-taxed country in the world." This is an alternative fact. We pay less in taxes, and our government spends less, as a share of our total wealth, than our counterparts in Western Europe and East Asia. But Trump is right when it comes to corporate tax rates; the U.S. corporate income tax right is among the highest in the world.

I really like the idea of consumption tax, and most countries have a pretty serious consumption tax. It's called a value-added tax or a goods and services tax ... It's a sales tax. It doesn't tax labor, it doesn't tax savings or investment - it taxes consumption.