There are people who think that having a flat tax rate, you know a certain percentage of your income and the same percentage for everybody, is a big simplification of taxes over a graduated income tax. That is what people say. Well, the way I figure it the tax process is to figure your earnings, and then to pay the corresponding tax amount from the table. Where the complication comes in is in figuring out just exactly what your earnings are, and after you have done that and found where you are on the tax curve you fudge your way up or down from there. Just about none of the THE MT VOID Page 3 complication comes from the shape of that tax curve.
Tax simplification is really a mathematically independent issue.
You could simplify a graduated tax as much as you could simplify a flat tax except for the one step where you have to look up a value in a table instead of doing a multiplication on a calculator. And let's face it, most people would look it up in the table even if they could just multiply to get it. But it is one of the myths of our society that a flat tax is just a whole lot simpler than a graduated tax and if you think about it mathematically that makes no sense. James E. LaBarre of the Science Fiction Association of Bergan County sends us the following list of upcoming events. Ellen Datlow, Susan Palwick Science Fiction, and Jane Yolen, panel.