‘Completely unworkable,” “irresponsible,” “happy talk,” “a disservice to the political process.” That’s just a sampling of what tax experts, most of them right of center, told me they think of one of the most popular lines from Ted Cruz’s stump speech, his promise that a President Cruz would abolish the Internal Revenue Service.
Senator Cruz has been talking about the idea for a couple of years now, but it got a bit more attention when he mentioned it in the speech he gave at Liberty University to officially launch his presidential campaign. The basic idea, according to his speeches and a conversation I had with a Cruz adviser, is this: If you radically simplify the individual-income-tax code, you can reduce the size of the federal tax-collection bureaucracy so much that you could then get rid of the IRS and disperse its functions across other agencies.
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