THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 15, 1996 TAG: 9604120036
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines
In the film ``Cheaper by the Dozen,'' a car pulls alongside the huge Gilbraith family and the driver asks, ``Are all these children yours or is it a picnic?'' To which the father, Clifton Webb, witheringly replies: ``They're all mine and it's no picnic.''
Well, today is a kind of secular American holiday. It's Tax Day. And it's no picnic either. In fact, it's a repulsive rite of spring. Once a year, the simmering dissatisfaction of citizens with a large, expensive, intrusive government is brought to a fine rolling boil by the April 15 income-tax deadline.
Citizens scream bloody murder, as much at the travail involved in figuring and filing taxes as at the cost since the feds have already withheld the money. Politicians denounce the system as a disgrace and vow to fix it. Then everything goes back to normal for another 12 months and the following April 15 the same charade is repeated.
If it were up to the average taxpayer, reform would have come long ago. The solution is easy enough to see. A flat tax, though touted as a panacea by some Republicans, isn't needed to simplify the process and get tax filing onto the proverbial postcard.
Progressive brackets that keep the working poor and the middle class from shouldering a crushing share of the tax burden aren't incompatible with simplicity. Ever-expanding loopholes, deductions, credits, exemptions are. The system needs to be cleansed of them. Except for the mortgage and charitable deductions, the mass of taxpayers derive little benefit from thousands of special-interest provisions that clot the tax code.
Unfortunately, those special interests are just why tax reform never comes to fruition. Jiggering the tax system is what politicians do in exchange for campaign contributions. Simplifying the tax code doesn't simplify their lives but threatens to put them out of business.
Also at risk are tax attorneys, financial planners, tax preparers, the IRS itself. The whole unwieldy, expensive, unnecessary tax industry that's been erected on the basis of an incomprehensible tax code would vanish if a few simple brackets with no gimmicks were to replace it.
Voters ought to vow to remember their frustration at trying to fill out their own forms or their ire at paying someone else to figure them out. They ought to demand that every candidate for Congress change the system - or else. But it probably won't happen. The pain will fade. Spring has arrived. We'll forget how offensive the whole business is until next year at his time when, once again, Tax Day arrives. by CNB