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Comment by spiralpolitik | Hacker News Reader

It's an easy problem to solve but the solutions (Estonia style national identity cards or a flat PAYE tax on all forms of income) are not politically viable in the US.

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Taxes should not be collected on income or in any way that requires individuals to "file" anything. Problem solved.

Why is PAYE unviable? It wouldn't have to be flat.

Because there is an entire industry of which Intuit is part of that profits off the complexity of current tax system. Simplify the system and profits go down.

HR Block was caught lobbying against simplification of the tax system for this very reason.

Because Congress never votes for a reform of tax codes because the lobbying from Intuit and HR Block et al is too strong, while there's no lobby for the populace at large to say "This sucks."

I would imagine that the sort of politics involved is Lobbying rather than ideological.

I'm sure people would be very happy to not have to file tax returns.

A mandatory national identity card would be an ideological non-starter to the small government wings of both parties, despite the fact that the information industrial complex would love a government project of that scale to attach pork to.

Oh, yeah the ID card side of things is a problem, same here. But we do have a national PAYE system that no-one complains about - they might moan about the levels of taxation but I've never heard of anyone bemoaning the mechanism.

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