An excellent WSJ essay: Taxation without Exasperation
“We could move back
to an income tax far more like that of 1913—one that imposes a tolerable burden
on upper-middle-class families and the truly rich while leaving the rest of us
completely untouched.
Getting there
wouldn’t be painless. The federal government spends far more than it did in Woodrow
Wilson’s day, for starters, so we would have little choice but to raise more
revenue than we did back then. And Congress has grown addicted to using the
income tax as an instrument of central planning rather than a means of raising
revenue, a habit that will be hard to break.
Still, a new tax
system that can increase economic freedom, raise just as much revenue as we do
today, and foster higher wage and productivity growth is in our grasp. All we
need to do is get over our irrational fear of the value-added tax, or VAT, a
consumption tax on goods and services that is used by almost all of the world’s
rich market democracies.”