Santorum Fair Flat Tax

[Frederick Foresight]

All. Both personal and corporate. Capital equipment amortized fully in the year it's bought. Exemptions are the litany of tax-deductible breaks any person, household, business or special entity gets in the code. Doesn't matter how I define them. Matters how the IRS tax code defines them. I have no idea how many there are. Probably tens of thousands. Perhaps millions. The standard personal ones cost of living expenses, dependents, mortgage interest etc.

To your first point, expensing capital costs in their entirety in the year they are incurred is advantageous for the taxpayer.

What I was wondering is if you were going to include the usual, ongoing expenses of conducting business as exemptions to be no longer considered. Expenses such as costs of good sold, rent, property taxes, utilities and so on. I ask because loyek590's post that you quoted, where you said the hell with all exemptions, included a couple of legitimate business expenses. So do you wish to do away with recognizing for tax purposes the ongoing expenses of doing business?

 

[fhl]

The gigantic number of employees at the IRS is not related to tax rates. It's related to what is defined as income. It's easy to have a flat tax on individuals, and I'm all for it, but when it comes to businesses, it will never fly to try to tax them on their revenues and not their income. Which means it's unlikely we'd ever get rid of the IRS.