As noted in a post here several days ago, the 1986 Tax Bill was one of President Reagan’s enduring accomplishments, not as much for the tax rate reduction as for the bill’s bold move toward tax simplification. Using that bill as a standard, Steve Pearlstein in this Washington Post article analyzes this year’s tax legislation. The result is not promising:
One of Reagan’s greatest achievements was passage, with bipartisan support, of the 1986 Tax Reform Act. The goal of the landmark bill was to make the tax code simpler and fairer while boosting economic efficiency. Loopholes were closed, tax rates were reduced, and all sorts of distinctions were eliminated so that individuals and companies with the same income or profits were required to pay roughly the same tax.
Those principles, however, are violated on nearly every one of the 930 pages in the recently passed Senate tax bill and the 398-page draft released last week by the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Bill Thomas (R-Calif.).
With a few exceptions, both bills are grab bags of special-interest provisions designed to reward the well-connected at everyone else’s expense. They reward companies that have played cynical tax games and open up new vistas for the tax shelter industry.
Mr. Pearlstein notes that tax legislation has again become the favorite tool for providing political favors:
Let’s begin with those provisions designed to favor particular companies or industries. In the Senate bill, these include cruise-ship operators, foreign gamblers, NASCAR track owners, insurers, timber companies, cattle ranchers, movie theater owners, and manufacturers of small planes, bow-and-arrow sets and fishing tackle boxes. And notwithstanding the fact that skyrocketing oil prices should provide all the incentive anyone would need to develop new energy sources, there’s a couple of billion dollars a year in new tax breaks for energy companies already well-endowed with them. In a final, gratuitous insult to the taxpayer, there’s even a provision for a blue-ribbon commission to study “comprehensive tax reform.”
The House would leave out the energy provisions but add tax breaks for bourbon distillers and wealthy taxpayers in places like Texas that, poor things, have no state income tax to deduct on their federal 1040. High-tech industry tucked in a provision that would ensure its employees pay no payroll taxes on all those stock options. And in a shameless vote-buying effort, Thomas’s draft would have the government pay $2 billion a year to tobacco farmers for the right NOT to pay them annual crop subsidies in the future, as if the quotas were some sort of property right.
Mr. Pearlstein closes by observing that this awful piece of legislation could be used by an able politician for the better good:
This may well be the worst piece of tax legislation to come along since 1986. If Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) wanted to steal the Reagan mantle, he would make plans now to return to Washington from the campaign trail and, Jimmy Stewart-like, lead a protracted Senate filibuster of the final bill. From his final resting place, the Gipper would be cheering him on.
Tax simplification is one of the many domestic issues on which the Bush Adminstration has abdicated its leadership position. Curiously, if President Bush loses in November, my sense is that it will be more a result of this type of political lethargy than anything that occurs in the Middle East.
Hat tip to Professor Sauer for the link to the WaPo article.