True -- just as the real motive for having a lot of tax brackets in the first place is equally obvious. And Catholic Emancipation was sold to the British public as being in the interests of Protestants, but the real motive for it was obvious. Do you feel that obvious self-interest is evidence against the rightness of a policy?
Nope. However, there is plenty of other evidence against providing tax relief for the wealthiest USians - outside of obvious self interest. The very fact that one would disguise this self-interest as "tax code simplification" (when it really isn't) is dishonest and deserves to be pointed out.
The point you are making on the flip side of the argument is valid too. It is obvious that the purpose for increasing the number of brackets is to reduce the tax burden on the poorest or increase the tax burden on the wealthiest. But I don't see anyone couching that argument as 'increasing the number of tax brackets'. eg. Bernie Sanders has just come out and said that he intends to increase the tax burden on the wealthy.
1. There is no 'correct' number of tax brackets.
Well, since the intent is evidently for the income-to-tax function to be a curve, and tax brackets are attempts at piecewise-linear approximation to the target curve, the correct solution would appear to be to simply use non-linear functions in the tax formulas.
Fine by me. It actually solves several problems...
2. The US tax system is almost perfectly optimal.
I take it you disagree? The article had links to a separate study that compared the current US system with a flat-tax-plus-transfer option and the Mirrlees system. Neither was much of an improvement.
3. The tax code is complicated but for some very necessary reasons.
Necessary for whom?
Did you even read the article?
article said:
"The tax code is thousands of pages long for a very simple reason: It is a model, in the economic sense, of all of economic activity," he said. "Most Americans don't spend a lot of time worrying about the taxation of cutting timber or of being crew on a tuna boat. But there are rules for that, and you may find the rules irrelevant to you, but the rules are complex for a reason."
The vast majority of the rules and amendments to the code were made to either incentivize a behavior (like having corporations make more eco-friendly decisions) or to avoid taxing income multiple times (like having corporations pay tax on profits and then having investors pay tax on dividend income from the corporation - paid out of profits).
4. The vast majority of US taxpayers will never need to delve into the details of the tax code anyway.
Can we seriously stop whining about our tax code being too complicated?
Was that you volunteering to do my taxes for me?
No, see that's why people believe the tax code is complicated -
because they are more concerned with what everyone else is paying in taxes. I know what my income is, what my deductions are, and what my tax rate will be. If I started worrying about everyone else's taxes - I might agree that some simplification is in order. Or I would make it a full time job to know the details.
4th grade children are laughing at us.
Show me a 4th grader who can do my taxes and I'll show you a future Fields Medalist.
All 4th graders can subtract and multiply. Show me how reducing the number of tax brackets will help them do that more easily.
There is no profundity in the article. There is just the equivalent of a person who doesn't live under one of the FAA's new "NextGen" aviation freeways, posting ad hominems that add insult to the injury that has been done to the people who do.
I didn't know this was a thing, but again how does knocking the brackets from 4 down to 3 help with this complexity?
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I say something similar whenever I get students asking me about the flat tax proposals that have been floating around for years now--the complex part of figuring taxes isn't in the rate structure, it's in determining your taxable income.
