When 'tax reform' is warfare

To pay for massive business cuts, Congress has chosen some losers

Tax wars.
(Image credit: iStock)

This is the editor’s letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

Do you pay your fair share of taxes? Unless your name is Warren Buffett, you probably feel quite certain that you pay more than your fair share, to make up for the undeserved tax breaks enjoyed by some other cosseted group — the rich, the 47 percent, corporate "fat cats," welfare "mooches." (Take your pick.) By design, our tax code is incomprehensibly byzantine, filled with loopholes, tax credits, and exemptions. The ability to manipulate who pays more and who pays less is Congress' greatest power, Katherine Mangu-Ward pointed out this week in The New York Times. "Politicians use the tax code to reward their friends [and] punish their enemies," she said. Congress is back at that game, with a major overhaul that dramatically cuts taxes for corporations, businesses, and heirs of multi-millionaires, and punishes blue states, upper-middle-class homeowners, the real estate industry, people with huge medical expenses, even adoptive parents. The trillions in business tax cuts will also be financed partly by borrowing money, pushing annual deficits from this year's $666 billion to more than $800 billion next year and $1 trillion by 2021.

When President Reagan signed the last major tax overhaul in 1986, it was enthusiastically supported by both parties. That reform bill was also designed to be revenue neutral, and paid for cutting top individual rates by raising capital gains taxes and eliminating many corporate loopholes and deductions. None of this is imaginable today: Bipartisan cooperation. Democrats agreeing to cut tax rates on the wealthy. Republicans agreeing to increase some taxes on businesses and investors. Fiscal sanity. In our far more polarized era, tax policy — like health-care policy, and everything Washington does — is simply partisan warfare. When the political infighting is over, you can be sure of this: The tax system will be no simpler. Will it be fairer? If you're a winner.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
William Falk

William Falk is editor-in-chief of The Week, and has held that role since the magazine's first issue in 2001. He has previously been a reporter, columnist, and editor at the Gannett Westchester Newspapers and at Newsday, where he was part of two reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes.