"It's not going to happen because there aren't enough people to make it happen and the risks that accompany it are too great."
You sound like you believe that allowing the current system to continue to grow like a cancer, as it has for the past several decades, is a low risk alternative. At current growth trends, our progressive tax system will exceed 100,000 pages by 2010. That optomistically assumes that it doesn't collapse of its own enormous weight before then.
We will have serious Fundamental Tax Reform - you can count on it. The question is whether we do so before or after we have a meltdown of our current system of federal taxation.
In addition, I didn't even mention our trade deficit, currently at $600 billion per year. As long as we have a tax system which puts our producers at a disadvantage vs their counterparts in other countries, you can expect that trend to continue. As Allen Greenspan recently warned, this isn't a sustainable trend. Sooner or later, this problem will have to be addressed.