The Death of the Income Tax: A Progressive Consumption Tax and the Path to Fiscal Reform

The Death of the Income Tax explains how the current income tax is needlessly complex, contains perverse incentives against saving and investment, fails to use modern technology to ease compliance and collection burdens, and is subject to micromanaging and mismanaging by Congress. Daniel Goldberg proposes that the solution to the problems of the current income tax is completely replacing it with a progressive consumption tax collected electronically at the point of sale.

Introduction ; PART I ; The Problem: The Income Tax is Broken ; Chapter 1-What is the Income Tax and Why is it Broken? ; Chapter 2-Taxing Income is a Flawed Concept ; Chapter 3-Tax Planning Under the Income Tax ; Chapter 4-Progressive Taxation ; Chapter 5-Tax Expenditures ; Chapter 5 Appendix-Kingdom of PAL:A Parable of Tax Expenditures, Tax Shelters, and the Passive Activity Loss Rules. ; Chapter 6-The Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT): An Admission of Failure ; Chapter 7-The Intractable Problem of Tax Cheating ; Chapter 8-The Deadweight Cost of the Personal Income Tax ; PART II ; The Solution ; Chapter 9-Tax Consumption Instead of Income ; Chapter 10-Individual Level Consumption Taxes ; Chapter 11-Business Level Consumption Taxes ; Chapter 12-The Current Internal Revenue Code: An Income Tax, a Consumption Tax, or a Hybrid? ; Chapter 13-An Introduction to an Integrated Two-Tier Consumption Tax ; Chapter 14-e-Tax: An Electronically Collected Progressive Consumption Tax as the Successor to the Income Tax ; Chapter 15-e-Tax Redux: Special Considerations ; Chapter 16-Transition to e-Tax ; Conclusion and Prospects for Change ; Appendix A-Tax-inclusive Rate vs. Tax-exclusive Rate and Gross-up ; Production and Consumption Charts-Simplified Production and Consumption Cycle, and Flow of Income & Expenditures Cycle