“The tax system we now have,” [then-Treasury secretary Don Regan] told Reagan, according to [Lou] Cannon [in President Reagan], “is designed to make the avoidance of taxes easy for the rich and has the effect of making it almost impossible for people who work for wages and salaries to do the same.”�

Meanwhile, of course, W. is designing a tax system that makes avoiding taxes not only easy, but matter-of-fact for rich folks with paper profits, while shifting the entire tax burden onto us working stiffs. As ridiculous as the B4B chant of “Tax Work, Not Wealth!” sounds on the face of it, it’s astonishing that not only do people believe that, but that they have the gall to foist such an ugly system upon us.

As Brookings/Urban notes: “Recent tax cuts and current proposals do not move the system toward a well-designed consumption tax or a well-designed wage tax. Instead, tax policy and proposals in the Bush administration move the tax system toward a wage tax that is imposed only on low- and middle-income households, because upper-income households would be able to take disproportionate advantage of the fact that capital income would be increasingly exempt from taxation, but interest payments would still be tax deductible.”

(The quote comes from Jonathan Chait’s article on “tax reform” in the current The New Republic.)