Abstract
The individual income tax has long been the mainstay of federal revenues. During the last decade, awareness of the inadequacies of our federal income tax has gradually permeated the national consciousness. The call for meaningful tax reform is now raised in all quarters-professional, academic, political and public.While this ubiquitous rhetorical support for change fractures under the weight of concrete proposals, the moment is at hand to fundamentally restructure our federal income tax system; it will be the challenge of the 99th Congress to effectively channel this abundant discontent into meaningful reform. The acknowledged defects of the current system and the need for additional revenue have produced an array of proposals for fundamental change. From this luxuriance, three genres emerge: (1) enactment of a national sales or value added tax as a substitute for, or supplement to, the federal income tax; (2) enactment of a broadly based tax, which could be progressive, measured by consumption rather than income; and (3) a major reworking of the income tax that will simultaneously reduce its stultifying complexity and substantially broaden its base. This latter category-a broad-based income tax-is in turn divided into (i) petitions for a flat (i.e., proportional) tax and (ii) proposals having some degree-of progressivity that, in the curious lexicon of tax policy, answer to the rubric of a "modified flat tax."
Recommended Citation
Chancellor, Thomas
(1985)
"Criteria for Income Tax Reform:
Evaluation of the Bradley-Gephardt
Fair Tax Act,"
Utah Law Review: Vol. 1985:
No.
3, Article 2.
Available at:
https://dc.law.utah.edu/ulr/vol1985/iss3/2