The individual tax code is riddled with deductions, exemptions, and credits that provide benefits to certain groups of taxpayers and favor certain forms of consumption and investment over others.
In some cases, these provisions are similar to earmarks that used to plague the annual appropriations bills in Congress. These preferences make the income tax unfair because it can impose radically different tax burdens on two different taxpayers with precisely the same annual income.
An ideal reform must eliminate such distortions, as the Bipartisan Policy Center’s plan does.
