House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp has embarked on a Tax Reform Tour, of which he says, “We’re going to be traveling across the country in the coming weeks, meeting with Americans — individuals, families, workers and business owners, big and small. We want to hear how we can make the system fairer and easier to deal with for families across America.” Nothing wrong with the Michigan Republican trying to make the tax system “fairer and easier to deal with,” except for the fact that reforming the IRS isn’t the real issue.
Making the IRS more customer-friendly, making its tax collection more efficient and reducing the red tape generated by its daily operation are like giving aspirin to a dying cancer patient. It may ease the pain ever so slightly for a little while, but the terminal disease keeps eating away at the patient’s body. As former Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes has said, “We can’t tinker with this tax-code monstrosity or try to reform it around the edges. The only thing we can do with this hideous beast is kill it, drive a stake through its heart, bury it and hope that it never rises again to terrorize the American people.”
