Steve Forbes, (CEO of Forbes, Inc, publisher of Forbes and American Heritage magazines and twice candidate for US president, has written a book promoting his flat tax, Flat Tax Revolution, Using a Postcard to Abolish the IRS.

Forbes’s Flat Tax is the second good alternative to the current tax system. The Fair Tax I have previously written about in The Columbia Star is the other. Both systems agree with President Bush that the current system is “a complicated mess, filled with special interest loopholes, saddling our people with more than six billion hours of paperwork and headache every year.”

The current system says the federal government owns your income and has the right to search your records and your property, seize your property, and imprison you for violating any of the rules written in the nine–million–word US Income Tax Code . (The Holy Bible has 773,000 words.) It gives IRS agents powers that most dictators would drool over.

Continued additions and deletions to the code will not work. Each change benefits some friend of a congressman. Each change complicates a completely hopeless system. Each change slows down the America economy. The tax monster cannot be tamed; it must be killed. The IRS must be abolished so the American taxpayer can be freed from its tyrannous grasp.

Forbes’ plan is simple - Throw out the current antiquated tax code and replace it with a 17% tax on all personal income. One annual tax on one postcard–sized form. The only exemptions are for children ($4,000 plus a $1,000 refundable tax credit) and adults ($13,200). Single mothers would receive a $17,500 exemption. If the taxpayer’s income is less than his/her exemptions and credits, s/he would receive a refund.

Under Forbes’ Flat Tax, a family of four would have to have an income of $46,165 to pay any tax. A family of six, $65,930. To see what you would pay under this plan, go to the website www.chooseflattax.com/calculator.asp and put in your figures. You might be surprised.

This would keep the same amount of money going to the federal government as it now receives. The Flat Tax would not supplant Medicare or Social Security taxes or state or local taxes.