The Founding Fathers had more of a clue than we might think, take Thomas Jefferson for example:
A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
Forbes has an excellent article on why the states should not have a Personal Income tax, but it makes even more sense for the Federal government, since state governments are closer to the people and can be influenced for good more easily than the distant Federal Government. The same arguments that apply to a state sales tax on non-essentials apply even more so at the Federal level.
The current Personal Income Tax System also creates winners, losers and cheaters: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/082415/whats-wrong-american-tax-system.asp
As well as allowing for statists and Democrats (but I repeat myself!) to pull their power cards with audits on those who disagree with their policies. (Remember Lois Learner?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Lerner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeA3s77O9Yo
Ron Paul was considered a radical for supporting an end to the Personal Income Tax- However, isn't the growth of government and the elimination of our rights reason enough to end it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul
The people who work at the IRS are truly stupid. Either that or we are being targeted for harassment.
We filed by mail for 2022. They lost our return all though my husband had a return receipt that it was delivered to them before the deadline. Somehow they still had cashed our check for the taxes we owed in spite of losing our return.
All of this got triggered by an initial letter. They said I didn’t pay any taxes nor file on the monies I earned separately for working my county polls. I’m retired and it was my only income for the year except for social security. My husband had to call them back to tell them we filed jointly. That’s when they told him they had no record of our joint return.
My hubby had to resend it all by mail with the exception of another check. Fax wasn’t good enough. But he told them he was post dating the return bc he didn’t want to pay any penalties as he had already filed before the deadline. He sent them a copy of the return receipt with our tax return.
So after they got our return they sent back another letter stating we owed them more tax money. My husband went through the return and said he couldn’t find where he went wrong. He even had to call the people at Turbo tax to see if they could find where he went wrong. They couldn’t see any error in it either. They went through each line together of his return. Then he called the IRS and asked them where the problem occurred. Neither he nor TurboTax people could find an error. So they finally sent him a copy of their data they had copied into a computer. Apparently one of their employees failed to carry over a qualified dividend into a separate column. So they had taxed us at the higher rate instead of a rate of 15% for those dividends That was their error and why they said we owed them more money. So whoever copied the data into their report failed to carry over those numbers. Their mistake but we are responsible to spend all our time trying to rectify their error!
The onus always lies on the taxpayer!
My husband called them back on the phone again with them to confirm the problem he discovered. They told him he needed to write up a description of the problem he found and remit all the info to them once again by mail for them to review
In the meantime we get another letter from the IRS on Friday telling us they were aware we were agreeing to pay what we owed. That was not at all what my husband agreed to! When he tried to call them after he got their letter it was almost closing and no one got back to him. Now he has to wait until tomorrow to call back.
His response to me each time is that Hunter paid no taxes on the millions of dollars he made yet we who don’t even have enough deductions to file but a single page get picked on for a measly few hundred dollars. All their mistake!
I bet many people would have just paid the extra money to them without even checking to see where they went wrong.