The President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform has handed Americans an intriguing and important choice: give up targeted tax breaks such as the mortgage deduction in order to gain a tax code that is fair, simple and an incubator for economic growth.

Since the nation’s last concerted effort to simplify taxes in 1986, lawmakers have made more than 14,000 changes to the tax code. Among them is the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is expected to force nearly half of all taxpayers to compute their taxes two different ways while unfairly denying them exemptions and credits available to everyone else.

And because the tax system is unnecessarily complex, more than 60 percent of the nation’s taxpayers now spend $140 billion to have paid professionals prepare their returns.

Leading economists and policy-makers have urged adoption of a broad-based, low-rate tax system to make the U.S. more competitive in the global marketplace.

The panel has proposed several sensible reforms that would promote economic growth. Now we’ll see if taxpayers are so wedded to prized deductions or lawmakers so tied to the special interests that promote them, that they won’t adopt a tax code that is sound, simple and fair.

(The Indianapolis Star)