Of course we had the 800 billion dollar stimulus that was suppose to be for "shovel ready" projects. It was suppose to rebuild our road and bridges. instead it went BS projects.
BS projects and BS special tax cuts. CPAs love special tax cuts even more than they love special taxes. The biggest obstacle to having a simplified tax code is the accountants themselves. They are like industrialization-era workers sabotaging machinery in an attempt to save their jobs -- except the CPAs have been doing it successfully for decades, and the machine they are sabotaging is our whole economy.
It's not just income taxes, either. Do you ever look at your phone bill? I do. About ten years ago, I developed software to bill various kinds of phone calls for a start-up company. I'm pretty good at that and rather than spend millions of dollars on off-the-shelf software+support, or pay high per-call fees to have the calls billed by some third-party,
I did it all in-house. Everything, that is, except the tax calculations.
Why? Because every time you make a phone call, you and the phone companies may be paying taxes to: two cities, two counties, two states, two state universal service funds, and the federal universal service fund. As a 50-state company it was not possible for us to keep up with all the pissant city and county taxes on phone calls -- even calculating the state ones in-house was not worth it for us because we were already paying per-call for tax calculation to handle the local stuff.
Phone calls aren't the only thing that are taxed this way. Fuel, electricity, water, pay television, cigarettes, beer, the list goes on and on. All these suppliers of goods and services that consumers purchase spend a lot of money figuring out those special taxes and paying them, and in some cases, the localities spend more money keeping track of them than they even earn from the **** tax receipts (long distance doesn't cost $0.30/minute anymore so a 1% tax on it isn't what it used to be.)
All these special taxes need to be eliminated. So do all the special tax dodges. The job of accountants should be to keep track of money, not to figure out the best new way to game the tax code, and continually lobby for it to become more and more complex so they can keep earning their salaries by cheating the working man out of decent roads.
