TRIP ON THE INTERNET CAN YIELD DETAILS ON FLAT TAX

On an unseasonably warm February day, few at the lunch counter were anxious to get back to work. The food was finished, but the coffee was good, and as the waitress filled our cups we filled the air with conversation.

After exhausting the inevitable weather chat, we had moved on to the unavoidable debate: politics. Fred and John were arguing the merits of the various flat-tax plans that were being kicked about in the media. Butch and I mostly listened.

Fred's contention was that anything that would simplify the tax code is an improvement. He's a small-business owner with a few employees and he greets tax time each year with the trepidation of a condemned man facing the noose.

"It costs almost as much for me to figure out this tangled mess every year as it does to pay taxes," he said. "Even if I have to pay a little more in taxes, a simple flat rate has got to help. Then I wouldn't have to hire a bunch of accountants and tax experts just to figure out how to give the government my money."

John wasn't impressed. He saw the various flat-tax plans as a way to lower taxes for really wealthy people while hurting working class stiffs like himself.

John's a lot younger than Fred and he is just starting his career. His income is about a third of Fred's, but his prospects are good for a decent income in a few years. In the meantime, though, he doesn't want Washington messing around with the tax code unless it's going to benefit him.

At this point, Butch jumped in. "You know, with a flat tax, John, you might not pay any federal taxes. Why don't you figure out whether it will cost you more or less before you rail against it?"

But John said it is impossible to determine what anybody's taxes would be under the competing plans. He wasn't even certain what they were.

Now it was my turn to join the fray. "I'll bet we can get copies of these plans and figure out for ourselves which is the better plan," I said.

The problem was, none of had seen anything in newspapers or magazines that clearly laid out the various plans with any detail that was useful.

Then it hit me. "Let's tap the information superhighway," I said. "The what?" came the response.

The Internet, with its almost infinite material on things a lot less interesting than the hottest political issue of the day, was bound to have a lot of stuff on flat-tax plans.

Kent Library on the campus of Southeast Missouri State University has a computer lab with Internet access, and sometime around March 1, the Cape Girardeau Public Library expects also to be tapped into the World Wide Web.

I decided to investigate the matter on a computer at the office after I finished work. Armed with demographics on Fred, John and Butch, I logged onto Netscape. The first thing I did was a search using Webcrawler, one of several search engines that help you find material on the World Wide Web.

Searching by the topic "flat tax" turned up 401 documents. That's too many to wade through, so I went back to Webcrawler. I wanted to compute what taxes would be under various tax plans, so I tried typing compute along with flat tax. That generated 132 documents.

That's still too many, but the second document, titled "Nerd World, Taxes," looked intriguing. There I found the "Flat Tax Home Page," which provided detailed summaries of the Steve Forbes flat-tax plan and other flat-tax proposals.

I still hadn't found exactly what I needed, so I did a Lycos search for "Armey flat tax calculator." Bingo. There it was. Someone had actually produced a way to type in a given income, tax filing category, flat-tax rate, number of dependents, other non-wage income, capital gains or interest income, mortgage interest, and other itemized deductions.

Once everything was plugged in for John, I clicked on "calculate tax." In about two seconds John's tax bill under three flat-tax proposals -- Dick Armey's, Steve Forbes' and Phil Gramm's -- was produced on the screen. It also showed what his federal tax bill is under current tax law.

Amazing. I decided to plug in the numbers for Fred and Butch as well. I found out that under the Armey plan, John would pay $1,470.50 in federal taxes. With the Forbes tax plan, the tax would be $1,173, and with the Gramm plan, it would be $1,520. Currently John, unmarried with no dependents and about $500 in state and business deductions, pays $2,625 in federal taxes.

For Fred, whose wife also works and who has two kids, the tax under Armey's plan is $2,737. Under Forbes' it is $2,142 and under Gramm's plan it is $2,360. He now pays a little over $6,000.

Fred and his wife make about $60,000 annually. They also have $1,750 in other interest income and a mortgage on which they pay about $5,000 in interest annually.

Butch, on the other hand, earns about $120,000 a year. His various investments make his annual taxable income about $123,500. Married with two children and about $10,000 annually in interest on his mortgage, he now is able to claim $15,000 in exemptions. His current federal income tax is just shy of $22,000.

Between John, Fred and Butch, Butch will benefit most from any flat-tax plan. Under Armey's proposal, his tax would be just under $13,000. With Forbes' tax plan, it is only $12,342, and under the Gramm plan his federal tax bill is a mere $11,440 -- about half his current tax.

As for my taxes -- I now pay between $800 and $900 -- I would pay no federal income tax under any of the proposals. In fact, I would have to make between $52,000 and $58,000 before I would pay federal taxes -- not something I'll have to worry about for several years down the road.

Interesting stuff. Time to print it out so I'm prepared the next time we mix it up at the lunch counter.