What would an ideal tax reform accomplish?
An ideal tax reform would make the tax system simpler, fairer, and more efficient. Doing that is a lot harder than it sounds. The goals often conflict. For example, progressivity means the tax rates increase with income. But going that route entails an efficiency cost since the economy grows faster when people are paying less tax. Still, there are some obvious ways to make the tax system simpler and more efficient without sacrificing fairness. We could eliminate the tax expenditures that aren’t worth the lost tax revenues and complexity. And we could consolidate the ones we want to keep so there’s not a whole long laundry list of, say, education tax incentives. We also could eliminate the individual alternative minimum tax (AMT), which scores the trifecta of bad tax policy. It’s inefficient and a lot of people face higher tax rates under the AMT than they would under the regular tax system. It’s unfair because people in very similar situations can face very different taxes because of t
