> "I do. Property in one thing that I think should be equally divided among individuals, with individuals being able to use/rent in whatever manner they please within certain confines (lots of assumptions here and lots of if and buts, but it's huge discussion)."

That's interesting, and rather goes up against the free markety ideas that the people with the most valuable use for land/property should be able to buy as much of it as they want from people with less valuable uses (who can sell it at market rates). I am interested and do wonder how that might work, and if it would work. Although I note that thing_you_like is allowed to be nuanced and complex, and thing_you_dislike must be bad because it's complex.

> All that will disproportionately affect the poor not the rich who can actually afford the taxes.

That happens when a speeding ticket is a fixed $100. Norway can give speeding fines up to 10% of the driver's annual salary. A bad property tax disproportionately hurts the poor, not all property taxes.

Your parent comment "Perhaps the most important question to ask is not who will gain - rather who stands to lose?" is the entire reason taxes get complicated - because every change is a change that someone gains and someone else loses. Any thing which is paid for by taxes has an argument over who should pay the tax, and how much of it; do parents pay tax for schools? Society benefits from more educated people, so does everyone pay? Is it an income tax because people who benefitted more from education can earn more? Is it part of property tax because family homes need schools built nearby? Solve for something all councillors/senators agree on - after they negotiate, for every thing and every slider.

> Personal questions: ...

They would be relevant if I had said the tax code was in any way optimal, good, efficient, should not be changed, or should not/could not be improved. My position is not that. It is if we give the greedy fat kid free reign to rewrite the rationing system the only expected result is all the food ends up on their plate and none on anybody else's.

We've seen Musk taking union busting actions, we've seen Musk's daughter accuse him of abuse, we've seen Tesla and SpaceX benefit from billions of taxpayer funding while Tesla arranged to pay no income tax on its billions of income, Musk has demonstrated lack of caring for the interests of other humans, the expected outcome of him rewriting the tax code is that he and his companies pay no tax and therefore others pay all of it. We've also seen years of Musk dashing off an unworkable ill-thought-out idea off the top of his head, so after "I pay no tax" the remainder is probably some pre-planned maximally self-interested tax code written by Peter Thiel et al, or some dashed-out-in-ten-minutes wildly unbalanced hopelessly unworkable napkin tweet.

I would like to see laws implemented with test conditions for how we will know if they are working, with a mandatory sunset period for reviewing them and if they aren't meeting the test conditions they automatically expire. I would like to see the tax code be mandatory computer-implementable with low tax filing complexity as a priority consideration.

> "It is intended to be a slur, infact the word bureaucrat itself is a slur. Being a bureaucrat is a negative skill or a parasite etc."

One person's bureacratic parasite is another person's necessary management. I enjoy Yes Minister[1] and am annoyed by the waste it parodies and mocks, but also acknowledge that a necessary and significantly sized part of any large system is the organization and management and implementation of the system itself; the UK's NHS is often criticised for having too many administrators, and at the same time for not having enough administrators to be able to do the work of organizing and making it more efficent on top of the work of keeping it running.

The second system effect[2], "scrap it and we'll start again and do it better", is a well known anti-pattern[3]; the cost of scrapping and rewriting the tax code, all the people through the Inland Revenue, all the accountants and lawyers who need updating, all the forms and paperwork and computer systems and reports and analysis which need refactoring, recreating, translating, documenting, explaining, staff training - staff hiring - the effort and cost is non-trivial, all on the unsupported dream "we will do it better next time".

Your original comment: ">sometimes you really are better off throwing it away and coming up with something reasonable from scratch." why not simply switch that around? First come up with a 'reasonable' tax code from scratch, put it into a bill, and because it's reasonable senators will all support it, then afterwards the old one can be thrown away? Obviously that hasn't happened, and surely the reason is that there is no reasonable alternative that everyone agrees on, and the only way to throw it away and come up with an alternative is to have a single authority force one through and expect it to be one which helps them and their friends and hurts others. Guarding against that is why we have Democracy not Dictatorship in the first place(!) even though Democracy is often inefficient and ineffective.

[1] https://archive.org/details/yes-minister-1980-1984 - a British satire / comedy from the 1980s set where a newly elected government minister finds he's been made head of the Department of Administrative Affairs, a department of 23,000 administrators. Example scene/situation is the new hospital with 500 'seriously overworked' administrative staff and no medical staff or patients: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAk448volww

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

[3] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...