Good Advice
Here's some fine counsel regarding what the Republicans and the Bush administration should push for now.

In a 2001 study on tax simplification, Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation found the tax code consisted of 1,395,000 words in 693 sections applicable to individuals, 1,501 sections applicable to businesses and 445 sections applicable to tax exempt organizations. A taxpayer filing a 1040 form could face a return of 79 lines with 144 pages of instructions, 11 schedules totaling 443 lines and 19 separate worksheets of embedded instructions.

The corporate tax code was even worse. And the cost to the economy, only for administering and complying with the rules - not including loses in efficiency from the distortions in the code - ranged from a low estimate of about $75 billion a year to a high of $300 billion.

The Tax Foundation, taking a mid-level assessment, noted early last year that compliance with federal tax laws requires the equivalent of 2.7 million full-time workers. That's more than the federal civilian payload, about double the military force and three times the number of police on the street.

As Aldona Robbins of the Institute of Policy Innovation noted, only by first tackling the structural problems with a tax system that continues to punish savings and investment can Republicans advance another primary agenda item - reform of Social Security.

The GOP has long held itself up as the party of ideas, especially on taxes. A failure by a GOP now in control of Congress and the White House to deal with the numerous deficiencies of the tax code would indicate it has no confidence in its tax ideas, so why should voters have confidence in what Republicans say about taxes?