> You hardly ever see all the rules thrown out in favor of a new system. It takes more buy in than you will ever get. Probably for the same reason that it's ra

> You hardly ever see all the rules thrown out in favor of a new system. It takes more buy in than you will ever get. Probably for the same reason that it's rare to see entire codebases scrapped and rebuilt from scratch (and that when you do, it's often the case that you end up with something that isn't an improvement). The judgment behind it has a lot in common with "look at all this terrible complicated code, this could be way simpler, let's just rewrite it." Which also sometimes is hard to get buy-in on, and thank goodness the industry has learned some Chesteron's Fence lessons. The tax code (like other forms of regulation) does stuff, it's a tool for policy as well as revenue, it creates and reshapes incentives. Criticisms of specific things it does or how it does them make sense. Vague criticisms like "cruft" or "complicated" should be for people who don't have a technical or systems mindset. And that's before we get to other points. Like the facts that for most people with some W2 income and a few investments, taxes aren't complicated, the system for filing them is, and the reasons for this are some specialized interests combined with partisans who suppose an advantage to making filing aggravating. And where taxes do require professional involvement, that has as much to do with the complexity inherent in situational judgments as proliferation of rules.