Detroit Free Press: Want tax reform? Start with simplifying the system. It is a monster, and like "The Blob," it just keeps growing.

Our tax laws have gotten so bad that in 1969 the government enacted
the Alternative Minimum Tax to make sure that about 200 rich people who
were completely beating the system had to at least send Uncle Sam a
little something. But since the AMT was never indexed for inflation, it
is now hitting about 4 million taxpayers, most of them in income
classes the AMT was never intended to affect. The solution will surely
come in the form of another layer of schedules, rules, exceptions and
forms, filled with holes poked through by special interests that pay
lobbyists thousands of dollars a year to make sure their particular ox
remains ungored by the Internal Revenue Service.

When the federal
income tax was enacted in 1913, the New York Times managed to print all
the required forms for it on a single page. Today, there are more than
500 different forms. The pile of IRS codes, regulations and rulings
tops 60,000 pages. It has grown by more than 20,000 pages just since
1995.

Back in 1996, writing the foreword to the report of a
National Commission on Tax Reform and Economic Growth, two stalwart
Republicans, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich, declared that "the current tax
system is indefensible. It is overly complex, burdensome, and severely
limits economic opportunity for all Americans" — unless, of course,
you’re a tax lawyer or in the tax-prep business.

But since that
bold declaration a decade ago, the system has only gotten more
cumbersome, to a point where, today, almost two-thirds of all taxpayers
are sufficiently intimidated by the system or so determined to find
every break they can that they use a tax preparer. That’s great for the
H&R Blocks of the nation, but it’s not right. Citizens ought to be
able to understand what their government expects from them without the
need of an interpreter.

Thomas Frey, a former IBM engineer who is
the founder and "senior futurist" of the DaVinci Institute think tank
in Colorado, predicted in a recent essay that the federal income tax
system will collapse under its own weight and be dismantled within the
next decade, maybe around the time of its 100th birthday in 2013.

"It is a system that has mushroomed out of control and few will mourn its parting," he said.

"It
can be argued that every major civilization in history has fallen
because of unsustainable levels of complexity. … Each one reached a
point where an ever increasing bureaucracy with an ever increasing
number of rules simply overloaded the administrator’s ability to comply
with them, and the systems collapsed."

Even with technological
advances designed to manage complex systems, Frey sees the IRS monster
lumbering irreversibly toward a breakdown simply because people no
longer understand it.

"The breaking point will be the human
interface and the exacting toll that the income tax system has placed
on people to comply."

One scenario for meltdown, he said, would
be a wealthy individual "who is far above average intelligence with
above average resources" suing the IRS, saying he is simply unable to
comply with the tax code. As the government attempted unsuccessfully to
explain and justify the system, the resulting political embarrassment
would force Congress to act or face a taxpayers’ revolt.

Of
course, there would have to be an alternative system enacted, the exact
form of which Frey says would depend on who’s got the political power
at the time. But something surely would be done. All responsible
citizens acknowledge the need for some level of taxes to fund a
government. They would just like a simple, clean system that you can
walk away from each year feeling confident that you paid your fair
share — and so did everyone else.

In 2001, the Congressional
Joint Committee on Taxation issued a report on simplifying the IRS
system. The report took 1,300 pages.

Frey may be on to something.

RON DZWONKOWSKI is editor of the Free Press editorial page. Contact him at 313-222-6635, at dzwonk@freepress.com