March 25, 2021, is the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of the flat tax movement. I include an op-ed that was published on March 25, 1981, in the Wall Street Journal. I wrote it four months after Ronald Reagan’s Tax Policy Task Force submitted its report upon his election. My motivation for the op-ed was that while the Task Force’s recommendations, which were largely adopted, improved the then current federal income tax code, they did not go nearly far enough to simplify and fix other flaws in the tax code.
My WSJ article can be read on my website: alvinrabushka.com. Click on the toolbar button for Articles and Essays. It is the first entry under the heading Wall Street Journal.
After its publication, Bob Hall and I collaborated during summer 1981 to write a flat tax plan. On December 10, 1981, we published it in the Wall Street Journal. (Second entry under WSJ heading on my website.). That article presented the Hall-Rabushka “flax tax on a postcard.”
Hall-Rabushka is a fully-integrated, progressive, single-rate consumption tax. Progressivity occurs in the wages and salaries component by way of personal allowances.
