Income tax is an incredibly wasteful way to collect tax revenue. Every year people need to spend hours, or days, filling out tax forms, collecting receipts, and so on, or they need to spend money to hire someone else to do it. All these man-hours of labor accomplish nothing productive. All the people paid to do the tax returns of others are parasites on society -- they are contributing nothing. But the government will never give up income tax, unless people stop paying it, and do you know why? Because it represents another way to screw money out of the general population. They are not going to replace it with a sales tax, because they want both sales tax and Income tax going at the same time. That way they can gouge deeper.