Here, for Real Clear Markets:
Pressed to explain last week how he would lower tax rates without sacrificing revenues, Mitt Romney suggested that he might cap tax deductions at $17,000 per return. This was entirely different from his earlier suggestion that he'd eliminate some of our dizzying array of tax deductions in pursuit of a simpler and more economically efficient tax system with lower rates but fewer write-offs.
In his latest proposal for reform that started out as a way to simplify our tax system, Romney would make it more complex. The political virtue of this new approach is that it lets him preach lower rates without identifying specific deductions he'd eliminate, and therefore without incurring political opposition from interest groups that fight to protect those deductions. But it's a stretch to call this tax reform as it's generally understood.
You will read the rest of the article in vain looking for any discussion of the fact that when the much vaunted lower tax rates which came in the 1986 tax reform disappeared under Clinton, the deductions which went away in 1986 were no longer present to protect taxpayers from the full force of the those rate increases.
The presence of many deductions in the tax code represents the political success of the American hatred for taxes. They constitute rear guard actions, reactionary impulses if you will, against an otherwise intractable imposition of unconstitutional coercion and immoral inequality before the law. It is unjust to charge some taxpayers more than others.
Tax reform as we know it is a fool's errand for conservatives. Reagan, Kemp, Bushes I and II and now Romney are all to one degree or another really liberals with respect to the tax code, dancing around the fact that the income tax itself was the innovation in American history. They play with the details, protraying their proposals as conservative now and again, without ever coming to the root of the matter that the introduction of the income tax was a revolutionary impulse and was itself just one in a series of many radical changes foisted on the American people during the Progressive era.
When conservatives in our time begin to roll back those assaults, then we may legitimately speak of "reform". Until then, Romney's waffling between eliminating deductions or capping them is significant only to people without a long view of the matter.
