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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: i-node who wrote (215130)1/16/2005 2:12:19 PM
From: neolib  Read Replies (1) of 1573696
 
You hit the nail on the head here:

When you start making changes to the methods of levying and collecting taxes, the cost to government and business is huge -- another complexity. Computer software has to be updated. Workers (government and private) have to retrained. All this stuff costs money and economic productivity.

The biggest obstacle to changing tax & accounting as well as legal statutes is complexity inertia. Look at the sum total invested in education of the practitioners in the field. Literally millions of people in the USA make their living as a direct result of the complexity of US financial and legal laws. These people have spent many years of schooling to do it as well.

Imagine waking up one morning with only Fed & State sales taxes of a single fixed percentage for all goods & services. No income or property tax. No complex business arrangements for tax purposes. The cost of implementing this is trivial compared to the chaos in the lives of CPA's, tax attorneys, accountants, software vendors, etc.

The argument in favor of the complexity is that it is useful. All the special provisions are supposed to encourage or discourage various behaviours that are to be encouraged or discouraged as deemed necessary by society (or special interest groups).
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