Is our tax system really like the weather in that everyone talks about it, but nobody can do anything about it? It would certainly seem to be that way. In 1984 President Ronald Reagan announced a plan "to simplify the entire tax code." Earlier this year President Bush said that he had appointed a bipartisan panel to simplify the "archaic, incoherent federal tax code." But in those intervening 21 years, the tax time effort hasn't gotten any less burdensome.

The Internal Revenue Service admitted as much when it told the White House Budget Office that the paperwork that went into preparing tax returns due today took 6.6 billion hours to complete. The Associated Press reported yesterday that even the IRS is worried about the time it takes to fill out the form (1040) that most people file. (According to the National Taxpayers Union it takes an estimated 26 hours and 48 minutes to complete the chore.)

So the IRA has staffed a special Office of Taxpayer Burden Reduction where seven people are "working full time to reduce the anguish for filers."

In an interview on National Public Radio a tax accountant commented, "In the industry, we call tax simplification the tax professionals' retirement plan, because every attempt to simplify it has just made it more and more deadly."

So why continue fiddle with a system if it can't be fixed?

The usual answer is that any of the alternatives proposed would be worse. But, as the international news magazine The Economist asks in the issue published on the eve of U.S. Tax Day, is there an alternative that has been adopted in other countries and is it working?

"The answer is yes," says The Economist, "and experience is proving that it is an eminently realistic one." It cites Estonia which introduced a "flat tax" on personal and corporate income in 1994 and reports, "The economy has flourished." Then came Latvia and Lithuania, Russia and Slovakia. In all, nine countries so far have adopted some form of flat tax.

David Keating, president of the National Taxpayers Union, which turns out an annual report on the increasing burden of tax preparation, warns, "If we turn the nation into a paper-shuffling, law-figuring-out country, no one actually gets anything done."

Something can be done and we suspect the flat tax isn't the only solution. Taxpayers of the United States, unite, you have nothing to lose but the weight of all that paperwork.