The only word to describe Friday’s job report is ugly. The private sector created only 118,000 new jobs in September, early estimates of job creation in July and August were lowered, average hourly earnings dropped a tiny bit, the labor force participation rate dropped to its lowest level since October 1977. Nothing here to justify the Federal Reserve Board’s policy gurus in raising interest rates, and much to make them happy that they withstood pressure to raise rates in the past. And a great deal of support for revising the nation’s tax code to get the economy moving ahead at a faster rate. Which all candidates for both parties’ presidential nomination propose to do. With reason.

The current tax code is a nightmare. Spread across 74,608 pages (up from 8,200 after WWII), the code forces Americans to waste 6.6 billion nerve-wracking hours and spend about $200 million filling out the many forms. One estimate has compliance costs at 20 percent of collections, which might have set Adam Smith spinning in his grave. (In Wealth of Nations, he wrote, “A tax may … take out … of the pockets of the people a great deal… [because] levying of it may require a great number of officers, whose salaries may eat up the greater part of the produce of the tax.”) The rates are the highest in the industrial world; the treatment of foreign earnings so draconian that American companies are using a technique called “inversion” to buy foreign companies and transfer headquarters and jobs to the foreigners’ countries; and the form-filling burden so complicated that the Internal Revenue Service could respond to only 37 percent of befuddled tax-payers’ pleas for assistance, leaving 8.8 million calls unanswered. (Cf. Smith, “The time of payment, the manner of payment, the quantity to be paid ought to be clear and plain to the contributor…”). The principal beneficiaries of the current system are the lawyers and accountants who devise legal means of enabling their rich clients to avoid the full swish of the IRS axe, and lobbyists hired by companies and individuals to persuade legislators to lace the tax code with obscure clauses that reduce the effect of the government’s rapacity on their clients.