“Reforming” taxes, according to Webster’s Dictionary, would be amending or improving them. It seems to me that the president and the congressional majority are instead “deforming” taxes, which means disfiguring/making hideous or monstrous.
According to a recent Gallup poll, only two percent of Americans say that taxes are one of the most important problems facing the country, and a majority of Americans are opposed to the current tax bill.
It is not complicated — when you are in a hole, stop digging. The deficits the nation is running up are unsustainable and, eventually, there will be dire economic consequences, not the least of which will be the burgeoning interest cost on the soon-to-be even more-accelerating deficit. Most elected officials will not have the stomach to make the level of cuts necessary to rid the country of those big annual operating deficits.
Congress should be raising taxes, making cuts where it can, and funding the Internal Revenue Service adequately so it can properly enforce the tax laws. As much as people hate the IRS, such spending would more than pay for itself.
Major legislation that is not bipartisan and not adequately and very publicly vetted is the result of Congress swinging from one extreme to another, like a pendulum, with more attention paid to partisan gain than public benefit. Eventually the pendulum is just going to fly off.
That needs to stop. The future of the country depends upon it.
Richard Whiting, Auburn
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