State News Service - Time for Real Tax Reform

Op-Ed

By Rep. Joe Pitts

After a long and harsh winter, Spring has come to Pennsylvania, and with it beautiful weather and Phillies baseball. But April is the cruelest month: it's tax season once again.

And it may be called tax season because it takes an entire season to do our taxes. According to the IRS' Taxpayer Advocate Service, it takes Americans a total of 7.6 billion hours to do their taxes--the equivalent of 3.6 million full-time jobs, or 867,084 years.

Why does it take so long? Because it's so complicated. The tax code is 4 million words long, which is almost five times the length of the Bible. The average adult can read about 200 to 300 words per minute, so it would take weeks to read the entire code.

It's very difficult to comply with rules if you don't know all of them. Who does this end up hurting? Working people who already have a lot of commitments on their time. Who does relatively well under such a system? Big corporations that can afford full-time tax attorneys and compliance agents. It's no wonder that most of us have to pay for software or tax preparation services each year. That's a waste of money that could be spent on stimulating our economy.

The problem has only been getting worse. A century ago, the tax code was 400 pages long. Since 1986, when President Reagan and Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill worked together on the last comprehensive tax reform, our tax laws have changed over 14,000 times.

President Obama's health care law added another 3,300 pages to the IRS' legal guidance, including over 1,000 pages of tax regulations. That's taking our country in the wrong direction.

The House acted this week to move the tax code in the right direction by voting to repeal the death tax. According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, repeal of the death tax would increase the total stock of American capital by 2.2 percent, boost the growth of our economy, create 139,000 jobs, and actually increase tax revenue in the long run. Ostensibly, the purpose of taxation is to pay for things. If cutting a tax can increase revenue, then it's a no-brainer that we should cut it. Imposing a tax just to punish certain people isn't right.

And it's not as though we aren't paying enough. This year Americans will pay $4.8 trillion in federal, state, and local taxes, which equals about 31 percent of the nation's income. That's more than we as a nation spend on food, clothing, and housing combined, and it's larger than the entire German economy, the fourth largest economy in the world.

This is simply too much: the American people are sick of working 31 percent of the year for free. That's not what drives us. That's not what gets us up in the morning. We work for the good of our families, our communities, and our societies. America is known as the hardest working country in the world, and we have the largest government in the world. It's just not fair to ask Americans to work harder to keep the government so bloated: it's time to reduce our spending.

We have more tax revenue than ever, in fact, more than any country in history, and yet we have more debt than ever: something is clearly wrong.

Republicans and Democrats need to come together to get tax reform done this year, and I'm hopeful that we will. Congressional leaders as diverse as Ron Wyden and Mike Lee have put forth proposals that would effectively allow us to start a new tax code from scratch. There is a growing consensus that our current system is wasteful, inefficient, and influences people's decision-making too much.

A lot of people didn't think that we could find a bipartisan solution to Medicare's Sustainable Growth Rate, but we did, and almost 400 Members of the House voted for it. With that same kind of determination, we can fix our tax code, as well.

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