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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure that their lobbying helps a little but that's not really what keeps our taxes complicated.

Lots of conservative/anti-tax/right-wing/libertarian types see the difficulty of doing taxes as a feature, not a bug because it makes people hate taxes in general and more likely to vote for Republicans/fiscally conservative politicians.

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thats insane. huge numbers of conservatives (everyone i know) want the irs gone and a flat tax. sorry to burst your bubble.

That is mostly true. So they oppose most things that make our current style of taxation--mildly progressive with a lot of deductions. So they want to make it as painful as possible for Americans so they can try to get what they want.

A "flat tax" means moving from the current 10%, 15%, ..., 39.6% rates to a single tax bracket. Tax brackets are one section out of thousands in the Internal Revenue Code and one line on the 1040. We could move to a flat tax and still have the current overcomplicated mess of deductions, credits and penalties in place, and that's what takes up most of the time and effort.

There are different types of flat tax[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_tax]. With true rate flat tax there are no deductions. I believe when most people talks about flat tax, they think of true flat rate.

> huge numbers of conservatives (everyone i know) want the irs gone and a flat tax.

Yes - because filing is so complex. If filing were simple, people probably wouldn't mind. So a complex tax filing system makes people lean conservative, and therefore vote conservative. So it's in the interests of conservative politicians for the tax filing process to be complex.

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