Tax reform sounds like a good idea to lots of people, but where to start? Eliminate the popular deduction for home mortgages? End the write-off for charitable contributions? How about expanding the Social Security payroll tax?
Not likely.
Politicians of all stripes in this presidential election year are clamoring for simplifying the tax code and closing loopholes, but that would mean Americans would lose some of their prized deductions.
Not that Congress actually is likely to end tax breaks for home loans or religious and charitable contributions anytime soon. President Barack Obama and his chief Republican challengers, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, certainly aren't advocating that.
In fact, recommendations to trim the mortgage deduction made in 2005 by a tax-overhaul panel convened by then-President George W. Bush and again in 2010 by a deficit-reduction committee set up by Obama were ignored by both those presidents.
Overhauling the complex U.S. tax code could mean that for everyone who would pay less someone else would pay more. Also, every existing provision in the code has its advocates.
"Tax reform is ferociously difficult. If you tackle it straight up, the likelihood of success is rather small," said Henry Aaron, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. "Whenever you try to take money away from somebody, they will fight harder to keep it than will those who stand to gain."
And if deficit reduction is also a goal, it makes the job even harder.
Most recently, a bipartisan deficit-reduction congressional "supercommittee" failed to meet a Thanksgiving 2011 deadline and had to disband when it could not find common ground on tax changes.
None of the major tax overhaul proposals now on the table seems likely to be enacted given the current political rancor in Washington.
Of course, a lot could depend on the outcome of November's elections.
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