Foreword by Mortimer Caplin

John Fox's superb new book is timely and essential reading as a new President and Congress deliberate which tax laws are in the country's best interest for this century.

When I served on President Kennedy's Tax Task Force and, later, as his Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, I became convinced that America's tax system needed major surgery. Multimillion-dollar loopholes for certain industries and classes of individuals, combined with onerously high tax rates for the great mass of taxpayers, were endangering public confidence in the entire federal tax structure. After returning to private practice, I urged Americans to send an outpouring of letters to members of Congress to end its ongoing destructive policy of legislating special tax privileges.

That outpouring never occurred. While tax rates have fallen considerably, too many of the underlying laws have become increasingly complex and worse--much worse. Because of this trend, I think it vitally important to the health and strength of this nation that people across the land read Fox's book. They will learn why Congress must greatly simplify the laws, eliminating all but the most compelling tax-relief provisions, and simultaneously reduce tax rates for everyone. They will be surprised to discover, as Fox ably demonstrates in an entire chapter devoted to the subject, that reforms along these lines in fact advance the fundamental beliefs of both conservatives and liberals alike.

Two myths sustain most relief or so-called incentive provisions--that they make the laws "fairer" or "promote economic growth." No one has written more persuasively than Fox why this rarely is true and why most taxpayers would be best served by a far simpler, broad-based, lower rate system guided by a single principle: People with equal dollar ability to pay taxes should pay the same amount, and people with greater dollar ability to pay should pay more. According to this principle, two married couples, each with two children and the same income, generally would expect to pay the same taxes, regardless of who their employers might be, the sources of their income, or how they spend that income. Yet Fox enumerates well over 100 special laws that allow one such couple to pay less, and often far less. In fact, nothing in our tax laws assures that if the Joneses have considerably more income than the Smiths, the Joneses will pay considerably more. Indeed, they may pay less.