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This will be buried in all the 400+ comments but I’m going to weigh in:

1. This is a first class mess. Consider the source, Kevin Brady head of the House Ways and Means Committee. He was my congresscreep. I called him kevin BARELY in a rally and tried to get it to stick but it didn’t. I also told him we had to hold a mirror to his face to see if he could fog it except when he was hustling money. Other that that he was mostly dead.
2. The only real hope for simplification is to bull doze the tax code and start over. It is like an old house too worn out and messed up to even consider remodeling.
3. I yelled then laughed at Limbaugh and Hannity yesterday when they said this is the first “significant” tax reform in 30 years. NO! Tell that to the heirs of those who died on December 31 vs those who died on January 1 after Barky imposed the inheritance tax AGAIN. Before you get all jealous about anyone who has enough money to have an inheritance tax issue remember that it is NOT the governments money. Back in the days before the “death tax” was repealed I saw how it devastates a family that worked hard for generations to build a hard scrabble family farm on the harshest part of the High Plains. The Dad was killed in a truck wreck and the family had to sell much of the place to pay the death taxes. Had he died only a few years later the death tax would have been a non-issue. What is right about that? Destroyed under one regime while others are spared the same fate under another regime. That is not the way of nations but of dictatorships.
4. We can’t have a stable nation without a stable tax policy. In my adult life I can remember at least FOUR events that have caused a change in the way we do business and plan for our own futures. Just one of them was having to plan and manage for capital gains taxes on home ownership, then not and then having to think about it again after Barky reimposed that little jewel. Same with inheritance taxes, the changes in capital gains tax rates from 15% to 20% under Barky and the list just goes on and on all the way back to Kennedy in my working life time.

The tax code in this country is just a tool used by political hacks [all politicians] to favor friends and punish enemies. It is not the means by which the nation pays for services to the common good. That is just a by-product.

We live in a banana republic with politicians run amok and brain dead citizens. It is only the greatest country in the world because we say so and so many of the others are so terribly bad. I wish I could be dispassionate and taciturn but what we have sucks and keeps me angry and frustrated that nothing really gets better when it could be and should be great.