Making a flat tax progressive

Having a flat tax is appealing to some Republicans. Although you would gut the tax preparation industry, you could also conduct a major downsizing of the IRS, and save lots of time and effort preparing tax returns. This saves the government, citizens, and businesses time and money, and is not to be sneezed at.

Liberals wish to preserve a progressive tax system, and a flat tax on its face isn't appealing.

Eddy Elfelbein did us a favor. He went through historical tax rates and calculated how to structure a flat tax in a revenue neutral fashion. He also said that if we insisted on doing that, conservatives might not like it so much: to be revenue neutral for 2005, you would exempt $35,725 in income, and tax every penny above that (including business, social security, regular and investment income, etc) at 31.85%.

Perhaps a flat tax is just and perhaps it is not. However, we can say that policy makers should not try to use tax policies to micromanage people's behavior. Do that and you get monstrously complicated systems like American tax laws.