From TIA Daily:
While the “flat tax” has been pretty much dead for the past decade in the US, it has been adopted in one country after another overseas, a process outlined in the article linked to below. While the flat tax is no cure-all–it is often justified as a way of increasing tax revenues–it represents a rejection of the egalitarian premise behind “progressive” tax rates.
“The World Is Flat,” John Fund, Opinion Journal, August 29
“Next month’s report of the White House tax reform commission will likely stop short of advocating a complete scrapping of the tax code. But look for it to have warm words for how well the flat tax is promoting economic growth in the more than dozen places–ranging from Ukraine to Hong Kong–that have adopted variations of it…. It’s increasingly popular overseas, with Romania and the republic of Georgia adopting it last January…. Even Germany, normally a center of intellectual stagnation when it comes to tax policy, has gotten the bug…. Flat-tax pioneer Estonia is even reducing its rate by two percentage points a year until it drops to 20% in 2007…. Alvin Rabushka, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, believes it’s only a matter of time before an emerging economic superpower like China or India goes the flat-tax route. His book on the subject has just been published in Chinese, with a preface by Lou Jiwei, the vice minister of finance.”
(See also today’s Daily Telegraph at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/08/29/do2902.xml.)