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fortes

Amen. (Although this will never happen).

I have a simple S Corporation setup in Washington. I have to deal with:

- City government (license & tax)

- County government (property tax)

- State government (license, 3 different taxes)

- Federal government (payroll, etc)

This is for a one-man corporation in a state without state taxes. The amount of paperwork and agencies is a total time-sink. Outsourcing it cheap for a small business either (need more volume to amortize the cost).

Sadly, I don't see simplification happening in politics anytime soon. Not only does it require cooperation between different levels of government, it would create fewer loopholes for businesses.

It's the same reason we'll never see a simple flat tax for personal taxes. Makes it too difficult to hide all the political favors.

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Fully agreed. I just shut down my S-Corporation because the tax savings weren't worth the extra hassle of all the paperwork and complexity.

The Lessig video that I just submitted has a great analysis of the incentive facing government representatives and why these kind of reforms are impossible. You might want to check it out.

why do you need licenses? Are you a brick and mortar business?

Doesn't matter if you're brick and mortar, you still need licenses having a basic business.

In general, the laws aren't really made with small/virtual businesses in mind. You need physical locations, in-person meetings, non-electronic paperwork, etc, etc.

Far better and simpler than flat taxes would be to eliminate all income taxes, both business and personal, and depend entirely on tariffs, excise taxes, and fees. Arithmetically this is completely feasible. Imagine if outside of import and export business and those industries affected by excise people had practically no interface with the federal government on a year by year basis.

Wouldn't that violate our various free trade agreements and lose us our membership in the WTO?

You write that like membership in the WTO is necessarily a good thing. It isn't. International organizations range from "mostly harmless" to horrorshows. (The mostly harmless ones are a basically specialized phone books with an information exchange/meet people conference every year or so - think ACM.)

Tariffs are a bad thing, but the US is a big enough gorilla that the WTO would figure out some way to accomodate the US in that circumstance.

Let me rephrase that. Pissing on _every_ _single_ other country we do business with by unilaterally ending free trade after we've spent decades setting up free trade agreements (and organizations like the WTO) seems like a suboptimal stratagem to me.

Yes, but that's different. It has almost nothing to do with membership in the WTO.

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