Ok what about for the people that mainly earn their living not from an income paid by a job; ie the richest people in the country?

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munk-a an hour ago | parent [-]

That's an excellent criticism of the parent and why we really do want a somewhat complex tax code even if it should be far simpler than what we have today.

We also want to balance regressive and progressive taxes, we do want to influence some behaviors through taxes that provide positive social outcomes - there are several really good complexities to have in our tax code. Just not as many as we do today.

	▲	rtkwe 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah so much of the complexity is around incentivizing or disincentivizing certain things; there's the mortgage interest exception because it's classified as a Good Thing (tm) to be encouraged/made easier and we have liqour/cigarette taxes because it's a Bad Thing we (societally) want less of. So much of that complexity doesn't even really matter to most people anyways, there are a handful of credits most people may qualify for and then the standard deduction is more than something like 40% of people's itemized deductions. And those credits are usually one time events around particular events/purchases that are relatively well advertised. The most annoying one I've had is when the EV credit required me and my wife to file separately to qualify for. It's so silly to think the entirety of the tax problem can be solved with one simple straight forward fix like the one proposed here. It's imo one of the peak examples of "broken tech brain" where people think the whole complexity of a situation can be solved with "one neat trick" kind of solutions. Far from exclusive to the tech world but I do see a lot of it from tech.