Let’s begin our discussion of income taxes with synonyms for the word “complex,” courtesy of the Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus.

COMPLEX: Byzantine, daedal, elaborate, U.S. income tax laws, Gordian, intricate, involved, knotty, labyrinthine, sophisticated.

OK, so I took a little literary license by adding “U.S. income tax laws” to the synonyms for “complex.” But whether Webster cops to it or not, the U.S. tax code is practically a synonym for complex. The complete Internal Revenue Code contains more than 2.8 million words. Printed 60 lines to the page, it would fill almost 6000 letter-size pages. That’s a ridiculously complicated way to express a brutally simple concept, namely that Uncle Sam wants to share in the spoils of your success.

Over the years a few brave souls have actually tried to tackle our tax laws for the express purpose of making them simpler and therefore fairer. Back in 1998 I did TV news stories about a couple of proposals then on the drawing board. The first was a proposal for a flat tax, proposed by Congressmen Dick Armey and Richard Shelby. Under this proposal, our entire tax code would have been shredded and replaced with a simple tax of 17% of income. No deductions, no credits, no exceptions. You’d get a big personal exemption, but every dime you made after that would have been taxed. For a family of four, for example, the exemption would have meant that only income above $33,800 would have been taxed, but everything beyond that exemption would have been taxed at 17%. The major selling point of this proposal was that everyone in America would have been able to file his or her taxes on one side of a post card. Proponents of the flat tax claimed that it would result in savings of $100 billion a year in IRS expenses alone. Those opposed said that a 17% rate wouldn’t be enough, claiming that it would take a rate of more like 22% to keep the red, white and blue in the black.

Also in 1998, Congressmen Billy Tauzin and Dan Schafer proposed an even simpler plan. They wanted to do away with income taxes altogether and replace them with a national sales tax. This plan had some real pizzazz since it repealed all personal taxes, corporate taxes, inheritance taxes and gift taxes. Better yet, it suggested completely dissolving the IRS by the year 2001. And it was very simple: income tax was to be replaced with a 15% sales tax on all retail purchases of goods and services. Sounded good, at least until you looked under the hood. Because while a national sales tax replaced all income taxes, it didn’t replace Social Security, other employment taxes or state or local income taxes. And when they said the tax applied to all goods and services, the key word was “all.” Houses, cars...everything. The final straw was that even with that onerous additional burden, some experts said that 15% wouldn’t be enough. It would take more like a tax of between 17% to 37% to make the system work. Try adding that on top of a new house.

While neither of these ideas ever made it to second base, at least the thought was good. The tax code doesn’t need to be complicated to accomplish its mission. If you can put a man on the moon, you should be able to separate a citizen from their money with less than 2.8 million words. So why are taxes so complicated?