Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Will it ever happen? Can Senator Bob Bennett’s dream - one shared by millions of Americans - of a simplified tax code and a 1040 form the size of a postcard ever be realized?
Anyone scrambling to meet tonight’s filing deadline knows first-hand the current tax code is out of control. First, it’s enormously complex - more than 17,000 pages long. Can anyone, anywhere actually understand it all?
It’s costly to administer. A study in 2002 concluded taxpayers that year spent nearly 6 billion hours at a cost of nearly $200 billion complying with the tax code.
It’s blatantly unfair. Special interest groups across the land have meddled to make it that way. Still, there is hope.
In January, President Bush formed an impressive advisory panel “to assist in reforming” the tax code. And more and more lawmakers are coming to the conclusion something needs to be done. As the effort goes forth, KSL encourages the experts to move toward a complete revision of the whole tax structure, not mere tinkering with the existing code. We like Senator Bennett’s idea of beginning the process with a “clean sheet of paper” and proceeding to structure something that is indeed simple, efficiently stable and transparently fair.
