It’s time to get rid of the IRS

Tax deadline day has passed. Whew! To honor that glorious day, here is a request: All in favor of destroying the IRS, please raise your hand. Wow, look at that sea of hands. Some of you have raised both hands. I don’t blame you. Especially those who are surrendering.

Getting rid of the IRS is a great idea. From the many hands I see, I guess you agree. Few in Washington would have the guts to do it. Or even propose it. But it is a good idea.

Yes, Senator Ted Cruz, a presidential candidate, suggests getting rid of the IRS. But most Americans don’t take the idea seriously. They figure it cannot be done.

That is a pity, because the IRS is a curse on this nation. A blight. For many, it is a monster that hounds and harasses them. For others, it is merely a migraine. Yet we don’t need it. We truly do not.

We have this immense economy. We need to bleed it to get money to run the country. So we sic leeches to the area of the economy known as income. Hence our income tax.

We could sic leeches on other parts of the economy — instead of on incomes. That would allow us to deep six the IRS. This would make the lives of most Americans simpler. It would allow the government to sack a lot of expensive bureaucrats. It would reduce the volume of lies in the country. (Most tax returns are collections of lies, from teensy little ones to whoppers.)

If we demolished the IRS, a majority of us would save money. All the money we now spend for tax advice. H&R Block would lower its flags to half-mast, to mourn its own demise.

Most of us would also save many hours of labor that we put into preparing our tax returns. Millions of dogs and their ribs would rejoice. Because we would no longer kick them for chomping the receipts we cannot find.

Killing off the IRS is not a pipe dream. Imagine if we closed it tomorrow. I mean just closed it. Where would we get the money to run the government? The money we used to get via IRS leeches?

How about we tax consumption? We levy taxes on everything we buy. Period. That is, we replace taxes on incomes with taxes on what we spend.

If you worry about our poor having to pay taxes, you should not. They don’t pay income tax now. Nearly half of Americans pay no income tax. If we had a consumption tax, yes they would pay some tax. But if the tax on necessities was low, they would pay little.

The people who would pay the most would be those who spent the most. Doesn’t that sound like a fair tax system to you?

Now, some would say that crooked folks would avoid paying taxes on what they buy. They’d do it by purchasing stuff under the table — on the black market.

I’m sure some crooks would do that. But do you suppose we might just have the odd crook or two who cheats on taxes in our current income-based tax system?

Sure, we would need to set up mechanisms to stream the consumption tax to Washington, D.C. But they would be tiny, compared to the monster of a machine we call the IRS.

My point is that we could get rid of the IRS. We could cleanse our lives of this monster. We could end the spending of hundreds of billions of hours and dollars on tax reporting.

And we could do it by merely tapping a different artery in the body of our economy.

Under our current system, our big earners pay most of what goes to Washington. If we taxed spending, the picture would be about the same. Big earners are big spenders.

So we would collect the money we need to run the government. But we would save ourselves many headaches, arguments, lies, ulcers, curses, and sleepless nights. 

Let’s just say we could deduct all of these things.

And our dogs would sleep better on April nights.

Tom Morgan writes about political, financial, and other subjects from his home near Oneonta. Several upstate radio stations carry his daily commentary, Tom Morgan’s Money Talk. Contact him at tomasinmorgan.com