What does equivalent mean? Is BitCoin an equivalent? Stocks? Real Estate? Food? An Education? Do like-kind exchanges count as income? What about non-like-kind e

What does equivalent mean? Is BitCoin an equivalent? Stocks? Real Estate? Food? An Education? Do like-kind exchanges count as income? What about non-like-kind exchanges? (i.e. what if you sell real estate and buy stocks?) What about barter? If I trade my property or time for someone else's property or time without it ever being denominated in "money, cash or equivalent," is that taxable? From the recent controversy, does a graduate school education have a taxable value when it's offset by work the graduate student does for the University? What about inherited wealth? Does an inheritance count as income? From one perspective, at T-1, you didn't have it and at T you did. But from the family unit perspective, nothing changed. If someone's spouse dies, since their 50% ownership of communal property just increased to 100%, is that taxable? If not, how is that really different than leaving wealth to children or extended family? What about expatriates? If someone lives in France, earns money in France and pays French taxes, do they pay US taxes too? What if they work part time in France and part time in the US...does that earn them the lower marginal rate in both countries despite earning a much more comfortable living? These kinds of overly-simplistic tax plans always seem to breakdown in accounting for situations that happen in the real world. And once all the necessary questions have been asked and the answers incorporated into the tax code, it's not that much simpler than what we currently have. Yes...the tax code is an overly-complex maze of crap that tends to benefit those with the best team of CPAs. But we're better off fixing that without throwing out the entire thing and starting from scratch.