By J. D. Alt
In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal (Capital Journal, Looking Past Fiscal Cliff to a Genuine Tax Overhaul) Gerald Seib lays out a very sensible argument about why the U.S. tax code needs to be rewritten “for the 21st century.” He points out that the tax code we are using was created in 1913 (before the Great Depression and the New Deal, I might add) and was last revised in any meaningful way in 1986—“before the Internet had any commercial use, before most of us had cellphones, before the U.S. began running $1 trillion annual deficits, before the oldest baby boomers retired, before income inequality had become a global phenomenon, before the advent of the euro, and before China, rather than Japan, became America’s main economic competitor.” Continue reading
