If you want to understand why the American tax code is so inefficient, I’d encourage everyone to read Cato’s tax guy Daniel Mitchell who’s recently argued that “Tax Loopholes Are Corrupt and Inefficient, but They Should only Be Eliminated if Every Penny of New Revenue Is Used to Lower Tax Rates”.
Think about that. If Max Baucus saunters down to the Cato Institute with a plan to eliminate tax loopholes, use 99% of the revenue to lower tax rates, and spend 1% on Pell Grants, Mitchell wants to say “no.” He would rather keep massive economic distortions in place than let the federal government get one extra cent of tax revenue. This is a fanatical and insane attitude. In politics, nobody ever gets what they want and never will. But when we’re lucky, it’s possible to get things that are better than the status quo. But when ideologues of this sort have become so influential on the American right, it’s extraordinarily difficult to make any kind of progress on anything.
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