Good God, Carruthers. A Flat Tax in Germany?

Don’t get too excited, old chap. Angela Merkel, head of the German Christian Democratic Party, says
that a flat tax in Germany is only a “vision” for the future. But the appointment of Germany’s principal
flat tax proponent, Paul Kirchhof, to her campaign staff has got all us flat tax wackos in a twitter.

The folks at the London Daily Telegraph are getting quite giddy. Writes
George Trefgarne:

Prof Kirchhof believes he can slim down or scrap more than 90,000 German
tax rules and 418 tax exemptions. "Each person only has to pay 25 cents out of each euro
earned," he
explains. "With the rest, he is set free in the garden of liberty."

Trefgarne smells blood. In Britain, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown likes the present system and likes

to review his Red Army of tax inspectors and officials,
parading past his window. In fact, he has just merged them into a sinister new department called
HM Revenue and Customs and moved 1,500 of them into his own building on Whitehall, where he can
summon them to his office to hear news of fresh victories.

And in case you think that describing Mr Brown’s tax collectors as an army is overdoing it,
a report by the Treasury select committee last year said there were 99,400 of them, only a
couple of thousand less than the strength
of the Army and much more than both the RAF and the Royal Navy.

We know that the British Chancellor doesn’t like the flat tax because documents obtained from the UK
Treasury say so. Oops! It turns out that the unredacted copy of the documents reveals that the officials
were quite impressed with the flat tax.

One of the Browned-out pieces even said there
could be an "economic mini-boom" if a flat tax were introduced.

By the way, in this
Reuters report
the German for “flat tax” is “einheitlicher Steuersatz.” It doesn’t exactly come trippingly
off the tongue, does it? Oh wait. There’s a short version: “Einheitssteuer.” So that’s all right.