Barack Obama, unveiling his economic plan yesterday, recycled a proposal from John Edwards:

To a degree, that vow entails bureaucratic measures; he proposed a plan to simplify the tax code by allowing the Internal Revenue Service to send taxpayers their returns already completed with income and withholding information supplied by employers and banks. The taxpayer would just check the form and file it.

We talked about this last April. I particularly liked the criticism from reader Andrew:

1) If you get one of these forms offering to calculate your taxes for you, and you sign it and send it back, does that make you immune from an audit? Whichever way you answer, you’re wrong. Because if the form does not confer immunity, it’s going to get an awful lot of people very angry. And if it does, it opens a whole can of worms. See below.2) If the form does come with an offer of immunity, the IRS has just told you everything they know about your income. Which means that if you have a source of income they don’t know about, you have just learned that you can get away with not reporting it.
3) There will certainly have to be limits beyond which you can’t use this service. For example, form 1040-EZ excludes people with more than $1,500 in interest. There will thus be a great incentive to avoid behavior that might push one out of the pre-prepared tax return category. As a simple example, would owning shares of stock kick one out of that category? What about mutual funds?

Insert from Jim: I’m pretty sure either of those would knock one out of the “simple” category.

4) If this program is successful, it will greatly increase the burden on people who don’t participate in it. Every time the tax code becomes more complicated, Congress will argue that it doesn’t matter because the IRS figures out so many taxpayers’ taxes for them.5) It will also increase pressure on businesses to report data to the IRS, so that they can improve the accuracy of their calculations. How long do you think it will be before eBay is required to report every auction to the IRS?
6) There is an implicit assumption behind this program that it is a good thing to make taxes easier to file. The conservative argument would seem to go in the other direction: Anything that hides any part of the burden of paying taxes is a bad thing. For that matter, I think we should do away with payroll tax withholding. Every taxpayer should be required to send in estimated taxes every quarter. That way people won’t forget what they’re paying, as they do now.

And one of my readers, John, asked how this proposal actually saves money:

50 million returns prepared by the IRS? And mailed out? And rechecked again? How many more IRS employees would that take, and how much would it cost?

Yesterday Ed Morrissey joked that zombie movie director George Romero could make the film of John McCain’s campaign. But bad ideas from Democratic candidates are the real living dead of this cycle, because no matter how many times they’re knocked down, they just keep coming back…