One path is to continue with an income tax, but only in the form of a simple flat tax for both individual and corporate taxpayers, with generous exemptions on initial, to-be-determined amounts of income. Thereafter, the flat rate would be applied on all income earned beyond the initial exempted amounts. This would address the political problem of regressivity faced with a national sales tax, thereby making it more politically feasible.

This system would be practically the same as the flat-tax plans proposed by Forbes but, in addition, would explicitly require replacing the existing Internal Revenue Code with a simple federal tax code no greater than the length of that established in 1913 — with a Form 1040 comprising a total of only four pages with only one page of instructions.

Such a radically simplified code with a simple flat income tax would provide the necessary political and operational justification for abolishing the IRS. The functions of the current IRS would be reduced enormously, allowing for a simplified tax-collection function to be transferred to a new tax-collection section of the U.S. Treasury Department and requiring a workforce of only a small fraction of the current 80,000-employee IRS.

[Sounds good in theory. However, any subsequent Congress could do what Congresses started to do not long after 1913, which is to conduct its social engineering through the tax code. It would only require a repeal of the statutes that “explicitly require” a flat tax. The only way to truly kill the IRS and the needlessly complex tax system it runs is to remove the constitutional authority for the federal government to tax income at all — by repealing the 16th Amendment. The only real path to that end would be an Article V convention of states. — Ed]