According to the Public Law 117-154(06/23/2022), the U.S. Tax Code is 6,871 pages. When you include the federal tax regulations and the official tax guidance, the number of pages raises to approximately 75,000. This zip file (pdf) is 181MB [0].
However, once I realized that -- as you said -- it's not just the law it's the court (and presumably IRS) rulings that supplement the law, that was too much for me and I noped out. My 2nd idea was to become an Enrolled Agent and then write up that experience, but I couldn't readily identify how much time and money that would cost
My home mortgage deduction and the solar tax credits are great examples of popular policies that would need to be changed when we simplify the code
Anyway the reason why we have deductions and tax breaks as such a big component is in large part because it is one of the things you don't need 60 senators to pass.
I don’t think it would work but it’s definitely interesting.
I’m pretty well convinced as a country basically no one charges shareholders enough for their limited liability in their corporation, and making the company share the benefit as well as the risk isn’t the worst way I can brainstorm to deal with that
It would probably make companies less interested in going public, but I like how it changes the meaning of a 'public' company to be more pro-social than just 'anyone in the investor class can purchase shares'.