Talk:Tax preparation in the United States

Ten page tax code

When the entire US Federal income tax code becomes simple enough to be written entirely in 10 pages or less, it will become understandable, fairer, transparent, better trusted, and less expensive to administer.

The federal income tax code is perhaps the most convoluted, intrusive, unfair, and burdensome regulation crippling the United States citizens.

The present federal income tax code is now more than 73,000 pages long. It can only be understood by special interests that use its obscurity to gain unfair advantage over United States citizens.

It will be helpful to simplify the federal income tax code to fewer than ten pages in total. Thanks! --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 13:52, 1 January 2019 (UTC)

Number of words in US tax code and regulations per the Tax Foundation

@Marshallsumter: @Lbeaumont: Might one of you be interested in trying to find someone active with Wikiversity's School:Law, who might be interested in initiating a project to review the US tax code and regulations on Wikiversity, and suggesting alternatives? The project could estimate the percent of the words in each section devoted to special interests vs. the public interest -- a "pork index" -- while also suggesting alternative text that would be sufficiently complicated to appropriately reflect the complexity of the US economy while still being sufficiently short and simple to be "understandable, fairer, transparent, better trusted, and less expensive to administer", as suggested above by User:Lbeaumont.

Might we be able to find one person sufficiently competent to outline such a project and start with some small part the could be done as a demonstration and then presented at appropriate professional meetings attended by leading legal scholars? If we could do that, Wikiversity might become a platform for crowdsourcing the generation of proposals for alternatives to different portions of US tax code and regulations.

Alternatively, might it be feasible to initiate such a project with a discussion of the changes required to have the IRS send a draft tax return to each taxpayer, as suggested by Lawrence Lessig and others and documented in his (2011) Republic, Lost? If my memory is correct, such changes have been proposed periodically at least since the Reagan administration in the 1980s and defeated by behind-the-scenes lobbying by companies like Intuit and H&R Block, who stand to lose lots of money that they currently collect from taxpayers who would just accept what the IRS suggests if that were an option.

Might it be appropriate for us to invite Lessig to propose specific changes in language -- or have one of his graduate students do it? I think appropriate language already exists.

Also, might it be appropriate to invite the Tax Foundation and maybe the Libertarian Party (United States) to contribute to this discussion, making sure they understand Wikiversity rules of writing from a neutral point of view, citing credible sources, and treating others with respect? If we can get the Libertarian Party (United States) to support such a project, we may also be able to get other political parties to officially endorse it as well. That could move enough of the locus of the debate on tax policies away from the secret negotiations on Congress into a public forum that could further increase news coverage as more people demanded to learn about this and Wikiversity provides easy access to reasonably unbiased information about this.

I'm too busy with "Time to extinction of civilization" and other commitments to spend much time trying to find people to lead such an effort, but I could try to contact Lessig and maybe the Tax Foundation if you thought that might be appropriate. If we can get this going, it could become a major project that could substantially increase the profile of Wikiversity as a platform for crowdsourcing research in the public interest while improving the quality of the US government and media coverage of this important issue. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 16:12, 1 January 2019 (UTC)