MarcusF:
It could work, but highly doubtful that it will.  Many of my tax clients have trouble wrapping their minds around anything more complicated than the Earned Income Credit... and the AMT is a totally alien concept to them.  I shudder to think what would happen with this.

A flat tax, instead of a progressive bracketed income tax, would eventually lead to the USA having an income distribution very similar to that of most 3rd world countries.

HotlantaTarheel:
A flat tax would also create a much higher individual burden on the lower classes and shift more and more money to the weathiest in society.  Capitalism, when unchecked, leads to more and more money concentrated among fewer and fewer holders.  A flat tax, instead of a progressive bracketed income tax, would eventually lead to the USA having an income distribution very similar to that of most 3rd world countries.

So what's your answer? Redistribution of wealth, which is essentially socialism?

Personally, I'd like to see a national sales tax on everything except food/water/medicine (those usually have a lower tax rate on them anyway). So something's going to cost, say, 17% more? Who cares if you're taking home 20% or more every paycheck?

Too many people look at any type of tax reform as helping the wealthy. They're rich; they're going to stay that way. They got that way due to several reasons, and rarely is it because of the tax policies of this nation. We should just focus on making the tax system simpler for everyone, and if rich folks happen to benefit from it, so what? I don't begrudge them their wealth. As long as a reform doesn't make things more difficult for the poor, there's no reason why a plan such as the one linked to in this thread cannot be tried.  

Too many people look at any type of tax reform as helping the wealthy. They're rich; they're going to stay that way. They got that way due to several reasons, and rarely is it because of the tax policies of this nation.

The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.

Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.

Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.

Let’s talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.

First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the “magic of the marketplace” were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn’t happen.

To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years.

Moreover, most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.

And then there’s the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.

There’s a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.” And last year we learned that lesson all over again.

Or did we? The astonishing thing about the current political scene is the extent to which nothing has changed.

The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance — which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.

But it’s much the same on other fronts. Efforts to strengthen bank regulation appear to be losing steam, as opponents of reform declare that more regulation would lead to less financial innovation — this just months after the wonders of innovation brought our financial system to the edge of collapse, a collapse that was averted only with huge infusions of taxpayer funds.

So why won’t these zombie ideas die?

Part of the answer is that there’s a lot of money behind them. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, I would add, his campaign contributions — “depend upon his not understanding it.” In particular, vast amounts of insurance industry money have been flowing to obstructionist Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Senator Max Baucus, whose Gang of Six negotiations have been a crucial roadblock to legislation.

But some of the blame also must rest with President Obama, who famously praised Reagan during the Democratic primary, and hasn’t used the bully pulpit to confront government-is-bad fundamentalism. That’s ironic, in a way, since a large part of what made Reagan so effective, for better or for worse, was the fact that he sought to change America’s thinking as well as its tax code.

How will this all work out? I don’t know. But it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn

Please consider the financial burden of not passing the public option on your constituents. Perhaps the two greatest worries among them are the loss of health care and the loss of a job, the two often being closely connected. This worry may in no small way contribute to the health crises of obesity and the use of unnecessary drugs, both legal and illegal, as palliatives.

Removing the fear of loss of health insurance, over which few of your constituents have any real control, will have a trickle-down effect on economic productivity that will far outweigh the cost of implementation of health care stability; and might in the long run be of greater economic benefit than rescuing the financial markets from the problems of its own making.

You as senators theoretically were given longer terms than representatives to allow you the breathing room to think deeply about issues. Our founding fathers expected greater wisdom to accrue from this time.

Please Sirs and Madams take advantage of that buffer and do what is in the extended and enlightened interest of your constituents and the country.

The author also fails to mention that Obama is making the economy worse, driving it to a point from which we may not be able to return. I can't speak to the OP's primary post about a national sales tax or flat tax, but what's going on now with this runaway spending and the trillion dollar deficits makes the drunken sailor spening Bush Congress look like a simple, little teetotaler.

In the longer term, I think there are many ways of bringing them down. Some will be to completely withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan; trim military spending, as Clinton and Gore had begun to do; institute real health care reform, including with a public option or best a single-payer system, to bring down costs and ensure efficiency; reinstitute a progressive tax rate and abolish the Bush era tax cuts; and get as much as possible of the federal dollars we taxpayers invested in the mega banks and other financial institutions.

I heartily endorse those proposals. In addition I would suggest the temporary institution of a graduated tax system similar to that in most developed countries - higher maximum rates at the upper end than before the Bush tax cuts - and fewer loopholes for both those and inheritance taxes. A law making it mandatory for them to return to pre-deficit levels after the deficit was lowered to some triggering level would make it easier politically. And an independent financial institution like the fed deciding when these triggers arrive would also help.

The administration deserves considerable credit for finally going after overseas tax shelters. This however should be pursued more aggresively. Partially enforcing a law is the surest way to prevent it from being an effective deterrent. Give financial criminals a loophole and they will make a lasso big enough for a Texas longhorn; and big enough to choke the world economy once again.

Part of the new revenue should go toward aggressively pursuing major public services infrastructure such as a national hi-speed rail system and publicly operated internet hardwiring that is leased fairly to all private communications firms. This would stimulate competition where there is very little right now - in the e-media.