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Brief History | The Challenge | The Objective | The Answer | Criteria Compliance | PDF Version | Contact | Financial Security
The complete Internal Revenue Code is more than 25
megabytes, and contains more than 3 million words.
If printed, would fill over 7000 pages!
To compound the confusion, the law is not so much
what is written, but what the courts have decided in
various tax cases brought before it. It is
impossible to claim that anyone truly understands
the document or its impact on our country.
Today’s tax code is so massive, so confusing that it
is simple to claim it is unfair for one reason, no
one can with absolute certainty calculate what
either an individual, company or corporation owes in
Federal Income Tax.
There
are other reasons that the method current Federal
Income tax is calculated and collected needs to be
changed. No one argues changes are needed but no one
has come up with a comprehensive plan to do so.
The American Income Tax
Simplification Plan attempts to do so
while addressing the issues raised by the Flat Tax
and the National Sales Tax initiatives.
During the Civil War Congress enacted the nation’s
first income tax law. Under that, people earning
from $600 to $10,000 per year paid a tax of 3%, and
those who made more than $10,000 paid higher tax
rates. It was the beginning of our modern income tax
system.
In 1913, the 16th Amendment to the Constitution made
the income tax a permanent fixture. The withholding
tax on wages was introduced in 1943 and was
instrumental in increasing tax collections to $43
billion by 1943.
In 2005, about 132 million tax returns were filed in
the U.S., and about 43 million returns will get back
every dollar that was withheld from their paycheck.
The remaining 90 million returns will end 2005
having paid about $1 trillion in federal income tax.
In
2003, total federal state and local taxes in the
United States were 24.2% of our gross domestic
product. 2003 Federal revenue was derived from the
following sources in billions of dollars:
Individual 1,006.4
Corporation 205.5
Social Security 749.2
Other 87.0
Total 2,048.1
The American Income Tax Simplification Plan
will look at a more fair, understandable and
controllable method of raising those portions of the
Federal revenue stream generated by Individuals and
Corporations. In 2003, this amounted to
$1,211,900,000,000. |
