Reviving Fiscal Citizenship

REVIVING FISCAL CITIZENSHIP*Learning to Love Form 1040: Two Cheers for the ReturnBased Mass Income Tax. By Lawrence Zelenak. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2013. P. 124. $35.IntroductionApril 15 is a day that most Americans dread. That date is, of course, when federal and nearly all state-level individual income tax returns are due. Agonizing over the filing of income tax returns has long been a perennial part of modern American legal culture. Since the mid-1940s, when the United States first adopted a return-based mass income tax, the vast majority of Americans have been legally required to file an annual Form 1040.1 Over the years, taxpayers have been complaining about, procrastinating over, and generally loathing the filing of their annual tax returns. Indeed, in recent times, April 15 has even become a day for political protests-an opportunity for some activists, like those in the Tea Party movement, to rail against what they believe to be "excessive taxation and government spending."2There was a time, however, when taxpayers tolerated and perhaps even looked forward to tax day. Armed with nothing but a pencil, paper, and calculator, individual taxpayers in an earlier era willingly sat down with a shoebox full of receipts and took on the personal task of categorizing their tax information, listing their deductions, and determining their net income and ultimate tax liability. They understood that paying taxes was an important part of belonging to a broader political and social community. During moments of national crises, many citizens even viewed tax paying as part of their patriotic fiscal responsibility-as a way to share in the sacrifices required by war and other emergencies.3 Evoking Justice Holmes's famous aphorism that "[t]axes are what we pay for civilized society,"4 citizens welcomed tax day as a chance to fulfill their civic duty to contribute to the commonweal.Today, those earlier days of tax-induced civic engagement seem to be a distant memory. Not only have many Americans become disenchanted with the overall tax system, as evidenced by recent public opinion polls.5 More importantly, as our tax laws have become more complex, an increasing number of taxpayers have become disconnected from the process of personally filing their tax returns. They have turned, instead, to professional tax preparers. Whereas in the 1950s only about 20% of taxpayers hired a preparer to assist them with their tax returns (p. 11), by 2008 that figure skyrocketed to nearly 60%.6 This rise in the outsourcing of tax preparation is symptomatic of the growing dissatisfaction with the current complexity of our tax system.7It is not only everyday Americans who are discontent. Lawmakers, policy analysts, and scholars have also been decrying the many defects of our present tax system. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill declared that the current tax system is "an abomination" and "not worthy of an advanced society."8 Similarly, Bill Archer, the former chairman of the powerful congressional House Ways and Means Committee, famously advised fellow lawmakers to "pull the current income tax code out by its roots and throw it away so it can never grow back."9 More recently, President Obama has argued that "our tax code is riddled with wasteful, complicated loopholes that punish businesses investing here, and reward companies that keep profits abroad."10In the process of criticizing the substance and complexity of the existing U.S. tax regime, scholars and reformers have also attacked our return-based tax filing system. Legal scholar Michael J. Graetz, for example, proposes limiting the current mass income tax to a wealthy minority of elite taxpayers and supplementing such a class-based income tax with a broad-based valueadded tax ("VAT").11 One of the apparent virtues of Graetz's plan, as the title of his book indicates, is the elimination of 100 Million Unnecessary Returns. …