Taxation in the United States

Fair, or Unreasonably Manipulated?

Campaign Briefing: Economic Policy and Fiscal Reform

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

July 9, 2026

I. The Tax Code as a Statement of Values

A nation's tax system tells the truth — or hides it — about who pays, who benefits, and who decides. The American federal tax code is approximately 70,000 pages of statute and regulation. That number is not a measure of complexity for complexity's sake. It is a measure of the accumulated political victories of every interest group that has ever successfully inserted an exemption, a deduction, a credit, a deferral, or a special treatment into the law.

The result is a system that is not simply complex. It is structurally unfair in specific, documented ways. Capital gains are taxed at lower rates than earned income. Carried interest allows fund managers to characterize ordinary income as capital gains. Offshore structures allow corporations to defer or eliminate tax liability on profits earned in the United States. Payroll taxes are regressive — the lowest-income workers pay the same rate as middle-income workers, and high-income workers pay a lower effective rate because the payroll tax applies only up to a wage ceiling.

These are not accidents. They are the product of specific political choices made by specific congresses at the direction of specific interests. The public largely does not know this, because the code's complexity obscures the choices embedded in it.

II. The Hidden Tax Burden

The most regressive elements of the federal tax system are often the least visible. The federal gasoline excise tax is paid every time someone fills a tank — it falls most heavily on lower-income households for whom transportation costs are a larger share of income. The federal excise taxes on tobacco, alcohol, and certain other goods are similarly regressive.

Tariffs — taxes on imported goods — are paid by American consumers in the form of higher prices, but are politically presented as costs imposed on foreign producers.

An honest accounting of what Americans actually pay in federal taxes must include all of these. This campaign has proposed eliminating the most regressive of them — payroll and excise taxes — as part of a comprehensive tax restructuring that replaces hidden burdens with a visible, flat-rate system above an exemption threshold scaled to local cost of living.

III. What This Campaign Proposes

The flat tax proposal this campaign has detailed in previous briefings is not ideologically motivated. It is structurally motivated — by the recognition that a system where the effective tax rate on capital can be lower than the effective tax rate on labor is not a fair system, that a system where the complexity of the code is itself a form of regressive burden — paid in money to tax preparers by those who can afford them and in errors and penalties by those who cannot — is not a just system.

Simplicity is equity. Visibility is accountability. This campaign will pursue both.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN