Hello old friend; where have you been hiding? The flat tax has emerged as a campaign issue in the GOP primary. That’s great news — not because it has a chance of passing, but because we’re in desperate need of tax reform, and the flat tax is a good starting point for those discussions.

“The flat tax is back,” The Hill reports. “Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) have both floated an across-the-board tax rate as they’ve launched their 2016 presidential bids. Neither Cruz nor Paul has spelled out the exact details of their plan, but both senators clearly see the flat tax as a way to appeal to both free-market conservatives that advocate for broad-based tax cuts, and the Tea Party sympathizers concerned with government intrusion.”

The flat tax, in its present form, dates back to Steve Forbes’ run for the presidency 20 years ago. He’s still pushing the idea, beautiful in its simplicity and its fundamental fairness.

“The federal tax code is beyond redemption,” he wrote just last year. “We should kill it and institute a flat tax. My flat-tax proposal calls for a 17 percent tax rate for all, with generous deductions for individuals and families (a family of four would owe no federal income tax on their first $46,000). And that’s it — no tax on savings and no death tax.”

The corporate tax rate, now the highest in the industrialized world at 35 percent, would be dropped to 17 percent, also.

The best argument for a flat tax is the pattern of abuse and political corruption at the IRS. President Obama may claim there was not a “smidgen of corruption” in the Lois Lerner scandal, but that’s simply not true. The facts are clear — the IRS targeted conservative political groups, based on their ideologies alone. When the scandal broke, the president said he was “outraged.” We all should be — still.

That scandal is one of the reasons for a flat tax that Cruz cited recently in a speech.

“The last two years have fundamentally changed the dynamics of this debate (on the tax code),” he said. “As we have seen the weaponization of the IRS, as we have seen the Obama administration using the IRS in a partisan manner to punish its political enemies.”

Economist Stephen Moore says the time is right for serious tax reform.

“The way to sell the flat tax is as the ultimate Washington versus America issue,” he wrote in the Weekly Standard. “The only people who benefit from a complicated, barnacle-encrusted 70,000-page tax code are tax attorneys, accountants, lobbyists, IRS agents and politicians who use the tax code as a way to buy and sell favors. The belly of the beast of corruption in American politics is the IRS tax code. The left keeps saying it wants to end the corrupting influence of big money in politics. Fine. By far the best way to do that is enact a flat tax and D.C. becomes the Sahara Desert.”

It’s good to have you back, flat tax.