Republican candidate for President Sam Brownback lays out his plan for an optional flat tax on the pages of RealClearPolitics today. Here's an excerpt:

Here's how the optional flat tax would work. If you prefer filing your income taxes under the current system -- for whatever reason -- then you could continue to do so. Or, you could file your taxes under the optional flat tax.

To account for the complicated credits and deductions in the current system, the optional flat tax would offer a generous personal income exclusion indexed for inflation. For individual tax filers, their first $20,000 of income would be excluded from taxation. For joint, married tax filers, their first $40,000 of income would be excluded. Looking at the work of many tax experts, I expect the optional flat tax rate would be in the range of 15 to 20 percent.

The flat tax would partially pay for itself by boosting GDP growth.

But we can achieve further savings by combining fundamental tax reform with fundamental spending reform.

Brownback goes on to recommend a BRAC-style commission to cut wasteful government spending programs to cover the difference and make his proposal revenue-neutral.

I don't think I'm alone in being attracted to the idea of a flat tax. Whether it's politically feasible or not is another matter, but if Brownback was able to implement it as an "optional" add on to the current tax code, I suspect millions upon millions of Americans would avail themselves of such an option purely out of the desire for simplicity.

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