Tax harmony in China: A lesson for the US

Nothing is certain in life except death and taxes. But in the United States, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference - which is why I like paying taxes in China much better. Exactly the right amount is withheld from my pay every month, and that's the end of it.

In the US I have to make sure that taxes paid match income earned, and then beg for a refund if I've given the government too much. This requires a mind-bending slog through a complex jungle of government forms that can take days to complete.

In China, by contrast, there's no annual mountain of documents to file, no bureaucratic codes to decipher, no math to mess up, no complex syllogisms written in a foreign language to misunderstand. And I'm not talking about the Chinese language. I mean the Internal Revenue Service's own arcane language that seems designed to frustrate as one navigates the byzantine US tax code - a total of more than 13,000 pages in 20 volumes.

China, by contrast, provides tax harmony. It's the feng shui of personal finance.

Taxes are on my mind this week because my individual report to the US government is due, and I have procrastinated. The deadline looms. There is no escape.

I yearn for a flat tax like China's. It's so gentle. So kind. So fair. So simple. So sensible.

In the US, if you make an error, you've painted a target on your back. You're ripe for a shakedown by Uncle Sam's army of accountants - unfeeling Borg drones in a vast bureaucratic hive whose sole purpose is to extort as much money as possible so the government can waste half of it. They wield calculators like cudgels.

One thing you never want is an IRS audit. Even if you're not corrupt, you may consider jumping off a building.

The US should forget about waterboarding terror suspects. That is so 2008. It's time for Torture 2.0. Force suspects to fill out US tax forms, with all the obscure worksheets, exceptions, exceptions to exceptions, deductions, credits and sub-calculations. I guarantee that will bring even the most hardcore prisoner to quivering, blubbering tears, willing to confess to killing the family dog.

The US tax code has grown like a noxious weed over time. Lawmakers have used it to slather largesse or exact punishment on various groups for more than a century. The result is a Gordian knot that nobody (with the possible exception of Lee Se-dol, the South Korean master of Chinese board game Go) can unravel.

A flat tax for personal income has been discussed often in the US, but it's never adopted. Perhaps that's because it makes too much sense, and sense has few friends in Congress, especially in an election year.

And so I cry out for relief, but I don't expect to get any.

A former US treasury secretary once said: "The nation should have a tax system that looks like someone designed it on purpose."

I agree. That's one reason I like working in China.

Contact the writer at randy@chinadaily.net.cn