The complexity of the U.S. income tax system emerged in part from the differentiated fiscal treatment of specific investments and various sorts of business expenditures that, as Richard Wagner says, creates “a tax code so large that no one can read it and which creates nearly a unique tax liability for each taxpayer.” While tax scholarship documents the costs of complexity, current scholarship lacks a normative legal theory that could inspire an alternative to this practice of targeted credits and deduction rules. This paper builds on Epstein’s general Simple Rules framework to develop a radical simplification of income tax: the operationalization of a uniform expense rule, i.e., the application of a single deduction scheme across all expenses and investments. With regard to the trade-off between targeted rules and this general approach, this paper investigates the nature of a uniform expense rule and reveals its strengths with respect to political economy. First, a stable and universal expense rule would narrow the scope of politicians’ ability to concentrate benefits on special-interest groups and would limit rent-seeking. The abolition of deviating rules for investments would restrict the scope of tax optimization, meaning that individual and corporate tax liabilities would be more determined by the ability to pay them. The same policy would save companies and government millions of dollars that they currently spend on tax compliance and administration of the tax system, respectively. Last, a deduction rule that applies across all businesses and industries would be less price distortive and thus would enhance the quality of the price signal.

美国所得税制度的复杂性部分是由于对特定投资和各种业务支出的区别对待，正如理查德·瓦格纳（Richard Wagner）所说，它创造了“一种税法典，以至于没人能读懂，几乎创造了一种每个纳税人的唯一税负。” 虽然税收奖学金记录了复杂性的代价，但目前的奖学金缺乏规范性的法律理论，可能会激发出针对这种有针对性的抵免和扣除规则的做法的替代方法。本文基于爱泼斯坦的一般简单规则大幅简化所得税的框架：统一费用规则的实施，即对所有费用和投资采用单一扣除方案。关于目标规则与这种通用方法之间的权衡，本文研究了统一费用规则的性质，并揭示了其在政治经济学方面的优势。首先，稳定而普遍的支出规则将缩小政客将利益集中于特殊利益集团的能力范围，并限制寻租。废除投资规则的偏离将限制税收优化的范围，这意味着个人和公司的税收负债将更多地由支付能力决定。相同的政策将分别为公司和政府节省目前在税收合规和税收系统管理上花费的数百万美元。最后，适用于所有企业和行业的扣除规则将减少价格扭曲，从而提高价格信号的质量。