http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&refer=columnist_ferguson&sid=aVT1SbsJOGZcBush, GOP Make Tax Simplification Complicated: Andrew Ferguson
Feb. 1 (Bloomberg) -- It's official: Unnamed White House sources are telling reporters that President George W. Bush will use his State of the Union address tomorrow to advance ``his bold reform agenda.''
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His Social Security reform, considered the boldest of the bold and the most breathtaking of all, isn't a proposal so much as an earnest expression of a desire to do something. Pummeled by political reality and hardened into actual legislation, Bush's desire will likely end up as only a symbolic alteration of the status quo.<snip>
In making this pledge, Bush sailed over its manifest contradiction: All the tool-giving (to go to college, adopt a child, pay for day care, buy a house, rebuild slums, become less dependent on foreign energy....in the party's platform is a call for nearly 40 credits, deferrals, exemptions or other "loopholes") the president pledged in one part of the speech was to be accomplished by filling the tax code with the "loopholes" he vowed to eliminate in the other part of the speech. Breathtaking indeed.
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As a governing ideal, however, Reaganism is as dead as its namesake. Republicans no longer disdain ``social engineering.'' They have embraced it in the guise of ``big government conservatism,'' through which government encourages citizens to arrange their lives in ways that conservatives favor.
And the instrument by which this behavior is encouraged, and its opposite discouraged, is the tax code.
Bush is the quintessential big-government conservative, and he has remade the party in his image. The proof of the transformation is the baroque, endlessly complex tax code he and Congress have created since 2001.
Why, it's enough to take your breath away.
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