Scrap the IRS?

Amid the sturm und drang over IRS tomfoolery (I needn’t say “alleged” here, because in the best of times, the US tax code is steeped in tomfoolery), folks are missing a huge opportunity: Let’s just scrap whole darn thing. This isn’t a left-right issue. This is a statement of fact: America’s tax code is a 70,000-plus page Byzantine mess. Is it any wonder that, through history, politicians have found myriad ways to use the IRS to settle scores and silence enemies? (Whether or not that’s what’s happened just recently.)

How much money does it take to live even modestly in the United States? Median household income runs about $51,000. In real terms, that is down 7% since the start of the recession. This has robbed many people of the ability to save or even create a financial buffer for emergencies. Not all families are created equal, based particularly on the number of children. The financial ability of an American family to make ends meet starts as high as nearly $60,000, which is a level tens of millions of households cannot hope to match.

If the citizens of many European countries could vote for whether the European Union should remain as the region’s central alliance, it might disappear. The data from Pew shows how much citizens of the region differ with their leaders on the future of the union, and voters usually have their way eventually. Almost all European finance ministers, the European Union and International Monetary Fund believe that the alliance is the only chance to pull the region out of recession, regulate banks and maintain free trade. Those assumptions may be correct, but politicians who support them will not last as leaders.

“I find it extraordinary that the massive global drop in human fertility has been so little noticed by the media,” writes Stanford geographer Martin Lewis, “escaping the attention of even highly educated Americans.” One notable bit here is how many developing countries now have lower birthrates than even some European nations. “Chile (1.85 children per woman), Brazil (1.81), and Thailand (1.56) have lower birthrates than France (2.0), Norway (1.95), and Sweden (1.98),” Lewis writes.