Doing taxes is a tax -- in hours and fees. Only the wealthiest people who can spend $10K on tax prep to save $100K via loophole deductions, oh.
But keep in mind, the Democrats controlled congress, so reform had to gain bipartisan support.
If taxes kept up, they would have noticeably higher effective tax rates than they used to have.
P.S. The “Tax Foundation” is a right-wing “think tank” (i.e. activists masquerading as researchers) funded by billionaires and corporations.
I would however recommend reading the whole paper they cite, http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2017.pdf
> Government redistribution made growth more equitable, but only slightly so. After taxes and transfers, income in the bottom quintile stagnated (+4%) over the 1980–2014 period while it grew a meager 21% for the bottom 50% as a whole. That is, transfers erased about a third of the gap between macroeconomic growth (61%) and growth for the bottom half of the distribution (+1% before government intervention). Taxes did not hamper the upsurge of income at the top, which grew almost as much as pre-tax.
> The top panel of Figure II provides a granular view of who benefitted (or not) from growth, by showing the annualized real growth of pre-tax and post-tax income for each percentile of the distribution over the 1980–2014 period, with a zoom within the top 1%. There are two striking results. First, the vast majority of the population—from the bottom up to the 87th percentile—experienced less growth than the (modest) macro rate of 1.4% a year. For instance, the 10th percentile declined by 0.6% a year pre-tax (+0.3% post-tax); the 30th percentile stagnated pre-tax and grew 0.6% post-tax; the 80th percentile grew 1.2% pre-tax (+1.3% post-tax). Only the top 12 percentiles of the population achieved a growth rate as high or higher than the macro rate of 1.4%. Second, even percentiles 88 to 98 experienced unimpressive income gains, between 1.4% and 2.2% a year—in most cases less than the macro growth rate of U.S. incomes for the preceding generation, from 1946 to 1980. The only group that grew fast is the top 1%, whose average income increased 3.3% pre-tax and 3.2% post-tax, with growth culminating at +6.0% a year for the top 0.001%. The top 1% has pulled apart from the rest of the economy—not the top 20%.
etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Passive...
You are wrong that nobody paid it.
That said, most of those people are still going to see it as a travesty because they had to pay a little more (god forbid people rich enough to have thousands of dollars of SALT pay taxes on the income used to pay that SALT).
In the second situation, the average (complacent) citizen will not look twice at the bill, but rather just pay it and get on with their life. In the former situation, the citizen is forced to have a 3rd party create a statement that says "I owe you this much because x" and because of natural incentives, the company will try to claim the maximum number of [incentives, loopholes, deductions, whatever you want to call them] so that the client saves the most amount of money. Of course the company takes its cut and I'm not arguing that greedy companies are the perfect solution. I'm just saying that there is more to the argument than simply it being a matter of lobbyists getting their way.
Republicans only last year substantially simplified tax filing.
However I do have to file an extra sheet of paper now just to fill out a single line for foreign address that's been removed from the 1040.