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The Automated Revenue Service

Keywords

war-on-disease, 1-percent-treaty, medical-research, public-health, peace-dividend, decentralized-trials, dfda, dih, victory-bonds, health-economics, cost-benefit-analysis, clinical-trials, drug-development, regulatory-reform, military-spending, peace-economics, decentralized-governance, wishocracy, blockchain-governance, impact-investing

74,000 Pages of Instructions for Giving Money to the Government

Your tax system has 74,000 pages of rules. To put that in perspective, the entire Harry Potter series is 4,224 pages. Your tax code is 17.5 Harry Potters long. Except Harry Potter has a coherent plot and your tax code has loopholes.

The Internal Revenue Service employs 83,000 humans to interpret these rules. It costs $12.3 billion per year to operate. Americans spend an additional 6.1 billion hours per year filling out forms. An entire profession (“accountant”) exists solely to decode rules that your government wrote for itself.

On my planet, when a system requires 83,000 interpreters, we don’t hire more interpreters. We rewrite the system.

The Replacement

function _update(address from, address to, uint256 value) internal override {
    if (from == address(0) || to == address(0) || taxExempt[from]) {
        super._update(from, to, value);
        return;
    }
    uint256 taxAmount = (value * taxRateBps) / 10_000;  // 0.5% of every transfer
    super._update(from, treasury, taxAmount);            // Tax goes to treasury
    super._update(from, to, value - taxAmount);          // Rest goes to recipient
}

Six lines. Every transfer automatically deducts 0.5% and sends it to the treasury. No filing. No forms. No audits. No compliance departments. No offshore accounts. No accountants. The tax is unavoidable because it IS the protocol.

You cannot lobby a smart contract. You cannot offshore a protocol. Every loophole in your 74,000 pages exists because someone paid a lobbyist to put it there. The replacement has no lobbyists because there is nothing to lobby.

The Numbers

Your current system costs $12.3 billion in direct IRS budget plus over $200 billion in annual compliance costs. That is $640 per American per year, just in paperwork. Not taxes. Paperwork about taxes.

The replacement costs approximately nothing. The 0.5% transaction tax collects the same revenue at roughly 0% administrative cost. The savings alone could fund a small country. Or, more usefully, clinical trials.

Why You Haven’t Done This

The 74,000 pages are not a bug. Every page represents a negotiation between a lobbyist and a legislator. Every loophole is a feature, purchased and maintained by someone who benefits from it. Your tax system is not complicated because taxation is complicated. Your tax system is complicated because complexity is profitable for the people who write the rules.

83,000 IRS employees interpreting 74,000 pages to do what six lines of code does automatically. And you wonder where your taxes go.