Tax reform battle could be worse than health care brawl
The recent congressional wrangling over Obamacare may turn out to be tame compared with the looming fight over your taxes.
Despite widespread, bipartisan agreement that U.S. tax rules need to be rewritten, there's little consensus on how to go about it. That's one reason it's been three decades since the last major overhaul, when President Ronald Reagan fulfilled a campaign promise that helped him win a landslide victory in 49 states.
"He sent [his tax reform bill] to the Hill and said, 'This is what the American people sent me here to do,'" recalled Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist in the George H.W. Bush administration. "And it still died twice on the way to getting passed. So, that proves you need a lot of political tail winds to get it done, and I don't think anything suggests we're in that kind of environment."
With the GOP health reform effort on life support, many Republicans are eager to move on to another major campaign pledge to cut taxes on corporations and individuals to help spur profit growth and raise wages. But the wide support for those goals has done little to close the political fault lines opened up by the fractious health care debate.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/tax-reform-battle-could-be-worse-than-health-care-brawl/ar-AAovSVe?li=BBnbfcN&ocid=edgsp
