Is the current tax system broken?
Will a reformed system share tax burdens more fairly and simplify the tax system? Simplification for the average taxpayer may require settling for rough justice and abandoning the use of the tax system as a vehicle to reward favored activities and constituencies. Can Congress resist the urge to maintain a system filled with targeted rewards? • What makes the cut? Is a national retail sales tax on the list? Preliminary indications are that it will not be. Even the ordering of the alternatives might matter and it is worth seeing if the obligatory income tax option is damned with faint praise. • What’s an X-tax? The panel may present consumption tax alternatives that look nothing like a retail sales tax, with unfamiliar names such as a consumed income tax or, most mysteriously, the X-tax. These look less like a retail sales tax and more like a wage tax, under which interest, dividends, and capital gains are no longer part of taxable income. • Soak the rich or the middle class? Look to see
