Fund the IRS properly. But also make taxes simpler

THE LATE Donald Rumsfeld once sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to accompany his tax filing. “The tax code is so complex and the forms are so complicated”, he wrote, “that I know that I cannot have any confidence that I know what is being requested and therefore I cannot and do not know, and I suspect a great many Americans cannot know, whether or not their tax returns are accurate.” This is probably the least controversial statement that George W. Bush’s secretary of defence ever made. Yet despite the widely shared terror of the federal tax-collection agency, Democrats in the Senate are proposing to increase its budget. Is this wise?

The political logic for doing so is clear. To make the arithmetic of a big spending bill just about add up, Democratic senators reckon that some of the required revenue can be found through more energetic enforcement of the tax code. Increasing tax revenue without imposing any new tax increases sounds too good to be true. But the Congressional Budget Office is game, estimating that an extra $20bn spent on enforcement over ten years would bring in $61bn, and that $40bn over the same period would yield $103bn, without any changes to the tax code.

For anyone who has ever filled out an American tax return, the prospect of beefing up the tax-collection agency certainly sounds...