It's what it contains. ..we should all be able to agree, it contains too much. ..

I just think we should be dealing with real facts.

However 70k or 3k there are too many people and companies exempted in its text...

Anybody with rudimentary english and arithmetic skills can do the bulk of the tax returns for the people. They could do it too if they tried and if they didn't pay attention to the liars who say it's 70,000 pages long.

I couldn't care less if some 1%er has to hire 50 accountants to work his tax return.

That's nowhere near a justification to do away with his taxes. Which is what he's trying to do.

12 pages mailed in...all but 2 of which full of zeroes.

The state probably let a contract to some "friend" to do the data entry and he gets paid by the page. That and anyone with a gop voting card gets a "special" deduction.

Because the 1%er is paying less than you are for his effort because of the rest of the code that doesn't apply to you. ..

If you're a legislative analyst and/or paralegal working in the tax field, then 70,000 pages is a conservative estimate because the total scope of information one needs to be familiar with includes...

(take a deep breath)

... the entire code, all possible new regulations through proposal, comment period, review, and final publication in the Federal Register, all news articles generated on the subjects, all Congressional hearings on the subject, all bills on the subject, and each of those bills from introduction through committee consideration, their reports on the subject, the votes in House and Senate, language differences between versions, conference committee compromises, statements from the White House which telegraph whether or not a bill will be signed into law, who the guys down at the bar say is tossing money into lobbying, the entire annotated code and the body of court cases and AG opinions, commissioners' statements, and so on cited within that, the archival structure of past tax law, where it is stored, how to get to it, who is the best archivist to butter up with fish and chips, biographies of important administrative officials, Members of Congress, judges, lawyers and their firms, lobbyists, and crazy rich people who constantly meddle for their own personal profit.

If one is really efficient, 70,000 pages of tax information per year might be a minimum volume of information that a legislative/paralegal team has to cover or at least know well enough to pull it up on request.

I used to do it, if the above nightmare flashback did not tip you off, not just about taxes, either.

Never in that time did I actually learn anything that made doing taxes less difficult for me! Every damned thing I ever learned about taxes was information for people who made a hell of a lot more money than I ever did.

You don't typically find a great tax attorney without a great paralegal researcher somewhere down the hall, in the shittier office without a view.

If you want to raise a large amount of revenue in a moderately fairly-distributed way, you need lots of clauses and exceptions and special cases.

I don't think you'd need 70,000 pages worth of them, though - even 4000 sounds like quite a lot, although not an insane number if most of those only apply to a specific walk of life and it's easy to work out what the section you need to read is.

"If it were possible, it would have been done" isn't a line of reasoning that *always* holds water (or else there would be no new inventions), but when large numbers of clever people have spent a lot of time trying something it does so more often than not.

I just wanted to know why. We all blow air out our ass now and then so I was just asking.

Maybe we could start by asking what the purpose of a "tax code" (IMHO a term for a flavor of capitalism) should be. I don't believe in "invisible hands" whether in church or markets systems. The game is set up and the rules provided by the developers. Could a start be by making a tax code that doesn't turn money itself a commodity? Make all forms of compensation 'income?' Encourage sustainability? Just asking.

You have some 110,000,000 households and 150 million tax filers (with some of them filing for more than one person).

You can make it simpler, but is that fair?

Deductions make things complicated, but they also can make things fairer.

Imagine two people with $70,000 in income. One of them has MS (or a spouse with MS) and thus has about $20,000 a year in medical expenses and one does not. Is it fair for them to pay the same amount of taxes, as if they have the same disposable income?

I don't think it is, so you basically HAVE to have a deduction for "catastrophic medical expenses".

Same thing with family size. A single person making $70,000 a year is not in the same position as a family of four making $70,000 a year.

So, in order to be fairer, you have to have an adjustment for family size.

Then there is business income. I had my own bookstore for seven years. Averaged about $17,000 a year in gross income. My net income was never positive. It is much simpler to just tax gross income, but it's not fair at all. But it is complicated to keep track of inventory and expenses. And so on. Why put all that on the tax form? Because it makes it at least a little bit harder to cheat.

The tax code is not "easy to work out what the section you need to read". Like most federal legislation it is almost impossible to read. Of your choices I would favor simple and sufficient. It would be nice if it was fair but that is impossible. People will always complain it is not fair no matter what. No one in human history has ever been happy about taxes and it is always 'unfair'.

Tax brackets aren't complicated at all. For most people, computers instantly apply the different brackets to taxable income and no one has to even bother with the math.

The complication lies in determining income. How much is your net income? What counts and what doesn't count? What takes away from income and what doesn't? That's where things get complicated.

The tax code includes hundreds of algorithms they call worksheets, and the worksheets need lots of pages of instructions and a form to collect all the info. At the end of it all the info goes on a two page form called the 1040.

Is just a right wing buzzword for the rich who want to pay less.

Once you understand a definition in it - it is pretty clear to read.

or some other arbitrary number in the tens of thousands.

Should the IRS Regulations, Official Guidance, and court cases be counted toward the number?

If you are self employed, own a business, have a complex estate plan, or are a corporation then more of it applies.

But a goodly amount is for the special treatments and loopholes that have been written in to accommodate special interests.