Between personal and corporate...

conservative estimates would put that about half a trillion per year.

IRS estimates the personal income tax gap (owed vs collected) at 375M and I've seen stats on the corporate side that the most basic (offshore tax haven) would bring in another 100bn.

Most of the contributers to the "tax gap" are all centered around use and/or abuse of deductions(loopholes).

http://www.irs.gov/p...final_version.pdf

This info shows the tax gap at about 300bn after enforcement collection...but that was 2005 based, I believe.

So, just simple changes to simplify (which simplifies also the enforcement and collection) would have eliminated the highest budget deficit (up until 2009, that is..but it would have cut that by 35%.

Devil is in the details.

Yes, there are some deductions that are clearly loopholes.

There are also very, very many that are entirely legitimate recognition that there is a difference between gross receipts and profit.

But there are quite a few where it is not so clear.

And that's not even getting into the use of special deductions to encourage activities that some power group (all too often a consortium of one well-connected taxpayer) rightly or wrongly convinces the authorities is beneficial to the public good. Which is the primary engine of campaign financing and a major part of why media ownership is profitable. If you are going to fix this category, you need to convince every politician to give up his biggest source of campaign financing, every company to give up its most profitable investment, and every media company one of its more profitable sources of business. I.e. it ain't gonna happen without really draconian (even if you don't think money is speech and corporations are people) campaign finance restrictions.

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