Everyone is put off by the tax system. It's a product of 300 years of cronyism. Want your tax break? Pay lobby Firm Jones and Smith, LLP on K-street a few million dollars, and in goes your clause as a subsection of an anti-gun hysteria bill passed right after some white elementary school kids in Connecticut get massacred. Like for-profit-prisons, there are too many people who count on the existing tax framework to see any actual alteration of it. The defense department needs their billions, as do the sub-contractors who make money charging 4x the market rate for because they're part of some GSA Alliance contract vehicle; the tax attorneys at Skadden depend on it being complicated, the hundreds of thousands of CPAs do too, as do the people employed by the IRS. If you change the tax-code to something like HK, all of those economic sub-sectors fall apart.

As someone who's a partner at a consultancy and in the highest marginal tax bracket, I'd be more than happy to pay my fair share if companies like Apple and Exxon didn't use countries like Ireland to avoid remittance taxes to the tune of 250 billion dollars a year, effectively putting the burden on the rest of us. (Well that and if we stopped spending 5x the aggregate of the next most-heavily invested countries re: defense, and re-allocate even 5% of that money to national education, STEM programs for innercity kids, the arts, and the NSF but again, fat chance of that happening.)