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Income tax is such a bitch to deal with. I used to support the idea of replacing it with GST/VAT because then I'd not have to deal with it. But then someone pointed out that disproportionately benefits the rich (who mostly just hold wealth rather than spend it) and disadvantages the poor (who cannot avoid paying for things).
So fuck it. Make it all income tax and get rid of the others! :P
(In before this is also a bad idea somehow)
Taxes usually start out simple, since that appeals to people. Then over time they get more complicated as people discover more and more edge cases to exploit.
If you make it all income tax, well, what counts as "income"? Elon Musk just got "paid" $46 billion worth of stock in Tesla, for example. But it's not actually 46 billion dollars. It's a share in ownership of a company. Those shares can't actually be sold for 46 billion dollars. Trying to sell them would cause their price to drop. He can't actually sell them at all right away, for that matter - they're restricted stock. He has to hold on to them for a while, as incentive to keep doing a good job as CEO.
So if he keeps doing a good job as CEO and the stock goes up in value by 10 billion dollars, was that rise in value income? What if it goes down by 10 billion instead?
This stuff is inherently complicated. I'm not sure that any simple tax system is going to work.
Darn it, you're right.
And as I suspected would be the case, some other folks have responded to my comment with a bunch of additional "simple" suggestions for what to do in this case. Which have hidden exceptions of their own, which will have unexpected impacts and loopholes, which will then elicit further "simple" suggestions for how to fix them, and before you know it we've got a complex tax code again.
There's an old quote of unclear providence that I think applies here, "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler".