I don’t have much knowledge about the tax code other than the fact that it is extremely complicated. I once went to a luncheon with a tax attorney I worked for about the various different legal entities that doctors could create to shield their practices from law suits and tax liability. The speaker talked non-stop for an hour and was nowhere near giving a comprehensive introduction on the subject.
Now three of President Obama’s nominees have been exposed for having tax issues–one of them will oversee the IRS, another of them actually helped write the tax code. The latter of these two examples, Tom Daschle, has now withdrawn his nomination. While there is no real excuse for either of these men not figuring out how to pay their taxes, the fact that it can validly be considered a “mistake” for someone to not pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes should give us pause. Does the problem lie with the individual or is it more a problem of the tax code? Of course both are flawed, but it seems to me that the tax code is the bigger problem. This raises more questions. Perhaps most importantly, why do we have such a complicated tax system? There are good reasons to have some complex tax policies in order to smooth income across socio-economic groups or reward/punish certain behaviors, however, we have clearly gone too far when some of the most intelligent people can’t get it figured out. So, when was it enough and how did we go too far? How do we fix it?
