No one denies that America's tax code is a mess. It is unintelligible, which is why 90% of taxpayers use an accountant or commercial software to file their returns. It is a labyrinth of loopholes, which is lovely for tax lawyers but bad for America. Public outrage tends to focus on specific abuses. How is it, people ask, that multinationals such as Apple can legally avoid billions of dollars of tax? Why is it, conservatives fume, that the Internal Revenue Service just so happened to select antitax groups for intrusive scrutiny? But the real problem is much broader. A tangled code is unfair and inefficient. Loopholes for some mean higher tax rates for everyone else.
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