THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Wednesday, March 29, 1995              TAG: 9503290008
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Editorial 
                                             LENGTH: Medium:   54 lines

NOT JUST LOWER RATES, BUT LESS TAX LAW THE TWO TAX BURDENS

As April 15 approaches, there are two issues to consider as Republicans try to write tax reform into law. The size of the tax bill Americans are asked to pay is a tax burden hard to overlook, but another more subtle tax burden is the way we are forced to pay.

The present tax code is a mess. It is weighed down with loopholes, requires taxpayers to resort to a vast industry of tax preparers and attorneys and is administered by a sprawling bureaucracy that is both maddeningly inefficient and autocratic. Almost 20 years ago President Carter denounced the system as a disgrace. Not much has changed.

Many Republicans claim they favor a flat tax or simply lowering brackets. It is also an article of faith among them that bureaucracy and social engineering are bad. But the tax reforms proposed in the Contract With America go in the other direction - more complexity, more loopholes, more social engineering, more bureaucracy.

Instead of trying to raise needed revenues in the simplest, fairest, least costly and economically neutral way, the Contract succumbs to the usual temptation. It sets out to use the tax code to tinker with our daily lives, influence the course of the American economy and win the affection of selected voters.

Capital-gains cuts and other business breaks are designed to please the Republicans' most reliable supporters. A middle-class tax cut is aimed at only those families that have children and earn certain amounts of money. Other reforms would target senior citizens for benefits.

The merits of the individual initiatives aside, this method of doing business is deeply flawed. It's been practiced on a bipartisan basis for decades and results in an unwieldly, intrusive and incomprehensible system that makes government bigger, distorts business decision-making and bamboozles the average taxpayer.

It's bad enough to have to pay taxes. It's worse to have to pay someone to figure out how much you owe. It's worst of all knowing some guy with a more powerful lobbyist has gotten his loopholes written into law.

Yet the fundamental premise of the present system is that tax writing should be largely concerned with providing breaks, exemptions, deductions and allowances to politically and economically powerful interest groups. But isn't that the sort of Dan Rostenkowski excess Republican reformers promised to put a stop to?

In Alice's Wonderland, the branches of arithmetic were Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision. Unfortunately, that's the kind of math the tax writers in Congress force on us all every April 15. Real reform ought to aim at less tax law, not more. by CNB