fits here I suppose
SNIP:
Tax Policy, Double Taxation, Tax Reform, and the Proper Definition of Income
April 15, 2015 By
Daniel J. Mitchell
With so many Americans currently filled with anxiety about their annual tax forms, this is the time of year that many people wistfully dream about how nice it would be to have a
simple and fair flat tax.
Unfortunately, there are many obstacles to better tax policy. I’ve previously addressed some of these obstacles.
1. Politicians who prefer the status quo make appeals to envy by making
class-warfare arguments about imposing higher tax rates on those who contribute more to economic output.
2. Politicians have created a
revenue-estimating system based on the preposterous notion that even big changes in tax policy have no impact on economic performance, thus creating a procedural barrier to reform.
3. Politicians enormously
benefit from the current corrupt and complex systemsince they can auction off tax loopholes for campaign cash and use the tax code to reward friends and punish enemies.
Today, we’re going to look at another obstacle to pro-growth reform.
One of the main goals of tax reform is to get a low flat rate. This is important because marginal tax rates affect people’s incentives to engage in additional productive behavior.
But it’s equally important to have a system that taxes economic activity only one time.

This is a big issue because the current internal revenue code imposes a heavy bias against income that is saved and invested. It’s possible, when you consider the impact of the
capital gains tax,
corporate income tax,
double tax on dividends, and the
death tax, for a single dollar of income to be taxed as many as four times.
And what makes this system so crazy is that all economic theories – even Marxism and socialism – agree that capital formation is critical for long-run growth and rising living standards.
Yet here’s the problem. The crowd in Washington has set up a system for determining tax loopholes and that system assumes that there should be this kind of double taxation!
I’m not joking. You see this approach
from the Joint Committee on Taxation. You see it
from the Government Accountability Office. You see it
from the Congressional Budget Office. Heck, you even see
Republicans mistakenly use this benchmark.
ALL of it here:
Tax Policy Double Taxation Tax Reform and the Proper Definition of Income