Don't Hold Your Breath...

Obama wants 'a simpler tax code'

President Barack Obama used tax filing day Wednesday to hold out hope for stressed-out taxpayers that he’ll pare down the “monstrous” tax code to make it easier to file.

Obama wants a "a simpler tax code that rewards work and the pursuit of the American dream," he said at the White House, where he met with several working families....

But in his remarks, Obama sought to portray his tax-simplification moves as way to make life easier to taxpayers. "I want every American to know that we will rewrite the tax code so that it puts your interests over any special interest. And we will make it quicker, easier, and less expensive for you to file a return, so that April 15 is not a date that is approached with dread each year."

I am sure this will be right up there with the Obama duplicity panoply, e.g. "no lobbyists in my administration", "will immediately begin getting us out of Iraq", "will reverse Bush policies on torture, rendition, domestic spying, and state secrecy", "will bring transparency in government", "will cut defense spending", "will return fiscal responsibility to DC", "will be a 'post-partisan leader", etc etc blah blah blah.

Nonetheless, we can always check back a year hence and see what Barack, Nancy, Harry, Barney, and Charlie et al have done to "simplify" the tax code. The baseline is currently 3,000,000 words of law and regulation.

Somehow I doubt they will be toying much with this sword of the power they so relish. Expect, if anything, fluff and flourish around the margins...purely superficial...perhaps pared down to only 2,900,000 words.

ADDENDUM: Nick Gillespie consistently cracks me up.

"Mega-props to our President Obama for yesterday's speechifying about simplifying and fair-izing the Infernal Revenue Service and all that.

Except for one small nitpicky thing: He's full of shit on this topic. How precisely is he or his Slugger's Row of policy mavens (you know, the idjits who can't even use Turbo Tax) gonna make the income tax more fair? As it stands, the top 1 percent of filers pay 40 percent of all income taxes; the top 5 percent pay 60 percent; and the top 10 percent pay fully 70 percent of all income taxes. The bottom 50 percent (5-0, Dano!) pay a whopping 3 percent of all income tax.

Kind sir, prithee, what the hell are you going to do to remedy this situation? You promise "tax cuts to the Americans who need them." Hey pal, I just shelled out tens of thousands of dollars so Citigroup can keep its fucking name on the 21st century's answer to Shea Stadium. Where in the name of Ray Sadecki and Bob Apodaca is my bailout?

And now this morning, Obama was on the tube again, yapping about traffic jams. What the hell is going on here? The president of the freaking United States is talking about traffic jams? Then again, in grammar school we did all learn that part of George Washinton's Farewell Address where he warned against entangling alliances and the dread menace of highway jughandles and traffic circles. That Obama's big solution is, ta-da!, "high-speed rail" is simply one more sign that he is simply not serious about anything other than paying off 19th and 20th century legacy special interests. I look forward to tomorrow's press conference, when Obama trains his laser-beam brain on the question of whether Razzles is a candy or a gum.

Seriously, isn't there a Portugese water dog re-gifted from Ted Kennedy that we can and should be talking about? (And btw, the one non-negotiable in a pet or a mistress for the Duke of Chappaquidick is swimmability; who says we can't learn from our past mistakes?).

Question to the folks, including some of the libertarian persuasion (you fools!), who were bullish on Obama back when the alternative was John McCain, the Terri Schiavo of presidential candidates: When are you going to admit that Barry O stinks on ice? That for all his high-flying and studiously empty rhetoric he's got the biggest presidential vision deficit since George H.W. Bush puked on a Japanese prime minister (finally, revenge for that long run of Little League World Series losses in the '70s!).

If you're the president of the United States and you're talking about goddamn traffic jams and you're proposing high-speed rail as anything other than an unapologetic boondoggle that will a) never get built and b) never get built to the gee-whiz specs it's supposed and c) be ridden by fewer people than commuted by zeppelin last year, you've got real problems, bub. And by extension, so do we all."