Pragmatism and Tax Reform

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Major tax policy reform is required about every 10 years, according to many tax experts. Yet our current Internal Revenue Code of 1986 has never seen a major revision. It has been amended and modified in dribs and drabs, however, at a rapid rate since first enacted. Here's the IRS' national taxpayer advocate, Nina Olson, quoted in the WSJ:
 
The tax code has grown so long that it's challenging even to figure out its length. A search of the code conducted in the course of preparing my last report turned up 3.7 million words. A 2005 study by the Tax Foundation, a tax research organization, found that the number of words in the code has more than tripled since 1975.
 
Tax policy is set with two primary objectives in mind. And they don't both include government spending. Tax policy is also used to create social policy, incentivizing choices that policy makers want to encourage. Examples include deductions for certain charitable contributions, tax subsidies for oil and gas exploration, and deductions for some expenses related to owning a home.
 
Our multi-pronged approach to creating tax policy will inevitably require some complexity in the tax code. But in my mind this makes it even more important to regularly review and overhaul the Internal Revenue Code, in order to clean up relics of thousands of revisions and redactions by Congress. A simplified, and more understandable tax code would be beneficial to all taxpayers, even without major changes to our tax structure.