Reply #6: This is what I keep trying to explain to the reflexive tax hikers

[notesdev]

The wealthy have the money to dodge any tax you can dream up, and that tax designed for the rich ends up being another tax on the middle class. It's tax deductions which are the problem, not the tax rate.

Same goes for corporate tax. Now that Japan is lowering its own, the USA has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Yet huge companies (GE, BoA) pay nothing at all! "It's the deductions, stupid" should be the mantra of tax reform.

Now why won't any politician touch them? Social Security is on the table now, why shouldn't, say, the mortgage interest deduction? Or charity deductions (where many of them are not charity by any reasonable definition at all)? Or any of a thousand other things that have been decreed as fiscally virtuous behavior (by the most corrupt process imaginable) and thus incented by the tax code?