Our overall system is what I am referring to, the freedom and the ease of starting and running a business and the skill of our workers and the incentives that are placed on various activities through the tax code have all added together and resulted in where we find ourselves today-- it has all been steered and corrected and elections have been fought and won to make changes for almost 100 years.
Our present tax code and how it influences behavior in so many ways to encourage home ownership, consumption and business formation, and capital investment, and risk-taking is a very complicated jumble. Unravelling it is not necessarily going to create Nirvana, and could have many unintended consequences that might take a generation to stabilize. Or it could be a fantastic transition and the economy booms, I think it is Russian roulette to pull the trigger on this radical of a change.
"....it has all been steered and corrected and elections have been fought and won to make changes for almost 100 years."
Indeed it has. And the result is a system which is so complex that even the professionals can't understand it.
If our tax system is such a marvel of economic incentives and so integral to our economic well-being, how is it that the American people despise it so much? Alternatively, how did the President's Tax Commission misread the sentiments of the American people so badly? You can read their interim report here
http://www.taxreformpanel.gov/index.shtml
The title of their report is "America Needs a Better Tax System".
PS: I have posed this question before on other FR threads and never gotten a response. I am not expecting one this time, either.