TAX CODE

[chiburb]

Snip:

The President’s ownership initiative hasn’t featured prominently in the media coverage of the campaign, which, strictly from a news perspective, is understandable: he hasn’t announced many specific proposals to back up his talk. But in downplaying the Bush Administration’s economic agenda the media is missing one of the biggest domestic stories of the 2004 campaign. When the President pledges to create an “era of ownership,” he is not talking merely about encouraging people to buy their own homes and start small businesses. To conservative Republicans who understand his coded language, he is also talking about extending and expanding the tax cuts he introduced in his first term; he is talking about allowing wealthy Americans to shelter much of their income from the I.R.S.; about using the tax code to curtail the government’s role in health care and retirement saving; and, ultimately, about a vision that has entranced but eluded conservatives for decades: the abolition of the graduated income tax and its replacement with a levy that is simpler, flatter, and more favorable to rich people.

Bush’s tax cuts weren’t just bigger than Reagan’s: they were more strategic. During the nineteen-nineties, conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill broke with the deficit hawks in their party and rallied behind former Congressman Dick Armey’s 1994 proposal for a flat tax (which was similar to the one Steve Forbes campaigned for in 1996 and 2000). Partly because the economy was gaining strength after Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increases, which helped balance the budget, and partly because studies showed that a flat tax would benefit the wealthy, who would see their tax rates slashed, the Republican tax cutters failed to make much progress. After George W. Bush was elected, they changed tactics. Instead of following the Reagan model and pushing for a single revolutionary reform, they promoted a series of smaller changes that would ultimately lead in the same direction. “That’s the hidden story of what is going on under Bush,” Stephen Moore said. “People like me have been advocating a flat tax for a decade. I helped Dick Armey put together his flat-tax proposal. Nobody could get it done politically. What Bush has done, in a hidden way, is move us in baby steps toward the flat tax.”

Much, much more in this great New Yorker article here:
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040906fa_fact