Driven by income tax induced madness, I’ve written an article (or rant) describing how to streamline federal income tax to make the system much simpler. Due to some of the changes, the poor generally pay slightly less and the rich slightly more, but the differences are small. There’s alot of changes that mostly offset eachother. For the most part, my system just changes or eliminates credits, deductions, and such. It also combines some taxes and basically butchers one of them. Taxes could (theoretically) be cut slightly because the operating costs of cutting taxes would be slightly reduced.
The article is at http://www.cowgodgames.com/articles/streamliningincometax.php .
It includes a link to an applet that lets you compute your taxes under the new system. Since the new system doesn’t have alot of variables, it was easy to write the applet. I cut one corner in that I only asked for “Total Income” instead of asking for each different kind of income.