JOHN LINDER: “there is simply no doubt that what we are talking about is follies, but the follies are a 45,000-page Tax Code. The…”

“there is simply no doubt that what we are talking about is follies, but the follies are a 45,000-page Tax Code. The Internal Revenue Code has made criminals of us all, and it is time for it to go away. There is a bill replacing the current code, H.R. 25, that would abolish the entire IRS and all the Internal Revenue Code and replace it with a simple, straightforward retail sales tax. We have spent $22 million in the last 7 years with economic and market research, and a study out of Harvard says, Dale Jorgenson, who was at the time the head of the Economics Department at Harvard, concluded that, on average, 22 percent of what you pay for at retail is embedded costs to the current code, which is to say you pay every company that has touched that product, their payroll taxes, their income taxes and their accountants and attorneys to avoid the taxes. It has been estimated that in 2001 Americans spent $250 billion just complying with the code, and that was only the estimate of the man-hours it would take to fill out the paperwork. That did not include the tens or maybe hundreds of billions of dollars that corporate America spent just calculating the tax implications of a business decision. And in 2001, after spending a couple of hundred billion dollars complying with the code, corporate America sent in to the government $187 billion. This is not an efficient system for gathering revenues.…”