The thing is that income can easily be hidden, moved or not reported, and it takes lots of resources at both the business and bureaucratic level to track and account for it.

That's largely a consequence of our privatized financial system. Give everyone a Federal Reserve bank account, let people do fee-less banking at the Post Office, establish individual publicly available revolving credit at the prime rate equal to... idk, 10% of your net worth... for daily consumption and 50% for big ticket items. Suddenly everything becomes a lot easier to track and a lot cheaper to manage.

You'll bankrupt the surviving credit card companies and every major retail bank. And, you know, that'll cause some problems. But if we're going to overhaul the entire underpinning of federal revenues, why not shoot for the moon?

As for “What is an acre of land worth?” - with a Land Value Tax you are basing that on the market value of solely the “unimproved” plot of land in an area

But that's entirely speculative, as real estate markets fluctuate heavily from year to year. I watched my own house gain and lose over 30% in the course of a few years, during the housing boom/bust. And I'm just a humble starter-home guy living in a hot market, not some Blackrock / Berkshire Hathaway juggernaut juggle portfolios in the trillions.

Income taxes are great because income is inherently liquid. If you're paying out at payroll, you're never going to not have that money, because the tax comes off before it even hits your bank account. Land Value Taxes are trying to tax you on an illiquid asset. If you're picking up a tab that fluctuates this heavily, you're setting lots and lots of people up for a sudden surge in state-owned debts. And that's a whole new kind of problem.

I’d say by default people are entitled to the entire fruits of their justly engaged in labors, and that taxes are optimally applied via “pigouvian” paradigms, where those that are creating “negative externalities” have to pay the rest of society for the damages in health, clean up and congestion costs they are putting onto others.

Listen, far be it for me to deny the man the sweat from his brow. However, what you're talking about isn't a tax issue, its a pay issue. As a contractor, I bill at $250/hr and get paid a meager $60. I'm soaked for 76% of my gross revenue before I even get issued a paystub.

If you want to abolish the wage relationship and guarantee everyone collects what they're due, my ears are open. But I'm not sure whether I'm going to move mountains over the $10 the Feds collect after I've been scalped by my employer for $190.

That's before you get into how pigouvian taxes are a bitch to calculate and heavily regressive if they aren't properly amortized.

Anyway - not holding my breath for any of these proposed changes

No. The political system at the moment is nothing if not heavily gridlocked.

But I've seen conservatives and liberals alike push all sorts of fancy tax reform schemes. The big problem I see is that the tax benefits some folks get aren't big enough to build popular support. And the tax hikes others get are guaranteed to provoke enormous outrage.

The only real path forward appears to be nibbling around the edges and refusing to fund the bulk of the IRS so nobody important ever actually gets punished for evasion.