Why not have a national sales tax instead of having an IRS with a tax code thousands of pages long? Is it because a national sales tax would be 'unfair'? Or is the real reason because then the government would lose a lot of the power of fear over the people? We could make necessities like food and medicine exempt from the national sales tax. The best thing about it would be that people who are being paid 'under the table' in cash, whose income is illegally not reported, would now pay taxes under a national sales tax. It wouldn't matter how you were paid. The tax could be adjust so part of it kept going to the Ponzi scheme known as Social Security, until a solution could be found for that mess. But a national sales tax would ensnare everyone, and everyone would have to pay their fair share.