I agree with your overall point of simplifying taxes by merging more things into income tax, but some of the taxes you mentioned are levied by local governments to fund themselves. The United States has a federal system; it would be a much bigger change to centralize all of the funding.
what stops "local governments" from applying same type of tax as higher levels? why would they need taxes specific for them?
It's theoretically possible for a local government to levy an income tax, but a lot would need to change -- much more than just changing tax rates. Employers and banks report income to the federal government (and states, I suppose, but I live and work in Texas so I don't know much about that). They would have to report that information to towns and cities too. There's also the problem of granularity -- how does an employer or bank know where someone actually lives? If you have a P.O. box in a town, do you have to pay taxes in that town? If you work in a different municipality (not uncommon!), do you have to pay taxes there too? If you have a home in one town, work in another, but spend most of your free time hanging out in a third, are you completely off the hook for supporting the third town?
You could have the federal government collect all the money and then allocate it to state and local governments, but that's a massive change in how American society works, and I'm not sure it's any less complex in the end. Some of the complexity in the tax code (e.g. different levels of capital gains tax) is a policy choice, but some of it reflects the complexity of the real world.
“Theoretically possible” in that thousands of local jurisdictions, among about 1/3 of US states, already do either income or payroll taxes or both.
That doesn't prevent there being a single point of collection and distribution.
If we had a single formula for taxes, then each taxing body could have their own rate table to apply to it, but still collect it directly - then I think that would be a better approach.
For simplicity sake, take income tax at flat rates. Federal may be 20%, your state might be 10%, city might be 5%. Maybe my state rate is only 5% and you might want to move here, but nationally we all pay the Federal 20% rate.
In Canada provinces can choose to harmonize taxes or collect independently.
There is no singular place we can change how many different taxes you pay. There's... thousands? Tens of thousands? Once you factor in city, county, state, federal, special districts, etc.
Until we simplify the tax code, though, can we properly fund the IRS to actually audit it? I think my thing (funding the IRS) is a lot easier to do quickly than your thing (completely rewriting how the government garners revenue) and I don't want perfection to be the enemy of the good.
This was reaffirmed by Marshall [1] with the famous “the power to tax involves the power to destroy."
[1] https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/mcculloch-v-mar...
We also want to balance regressive and progressive taxes, we do want to influence some behaviors through taxes that provide positive social outcomes - there are several really good complexities to have in our tax code. Just not as many as we do today.
So much of that complexity doesn't even really matter to most people anyways, there are a handful of credits most people may qualify for and then the standard deduction is more than something like 40% of people's itemized deductions. And those credits are usually one time events around particular events/purchases that are relatively well advertised. The most annoying one I've had is when the EV credit required me and my wife to file separately to qualify for.
It's so silly to think the entirety of the tax problem can be solved with one simple straight forward fix like the one proposed here. It's imo one of the peak examples of "broken tech brain" where people think the whole complexity of a situation can be solved with "one neat trick" kind of solutions. Far from exclusive to the tech world but I do see a lot of it from tech.
The very first things you list aren't related to the IRS at all. They're local and state taxes, and to get rid of those would require a radical rewriting of the Constitution itself. Not to mention it would destroy all fire department, county hospital, school, city park, state park, etc. funding.
How quickly people show their colors.
So Americans get taxed a lot at many different levels of activity. The cognitive load of having so many different points of taxation is annoying and exhausting to a lot of people. It makes household budgeting a lot more work than it really needs to be.
But it is this way because of the Constitution
They maybe we should change that and have a simpler system with much less complexity. Dismissing people who object to the painful complexity of the US tax regime as 'evaders' is npt insightful or helpful.
Wholeheartedly agree, but I see the root cause of the issue being income tax itself. As soon as you tax income, you'll go down and endless rabbit hole of what's fair to tax, how much, what kind of income, investment income vs wage income, percentage vs flat rate, etc...
That gave us the mess we have.
I like the idea of consumption tax exclusively (would require an amendment). You're taxed on your purchases.
It's easy to drive behavior (more tax on some things... tax on cigarettes, yachts and private jets) and easy to make more fair (exclude grocery staples).
Why?
The tax code exists for Welfare Queen Billionaires like Elon Musk.