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<div class="cpf-deletable cpf-printOut-header-title"><font size="6"><b>Why tax reform talk a dead end - CNN.com</b></font></div>
<div style class="cpf-deletable cpf-printOut-header-byline">By John Avlon, CNN Contributor</div>
<div style class="cpf-deletable cpf-printOut-header-dateline">2012-04-16T22:53:33Z</div>
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<div class="cpf-deletable cpf-printOut-header-domain">CNN.com</div>
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<p style class="cpf-printOut-body-content">
<span><span>Editor's note:</span> John Avlon is a CNN contributor and
senior political columnist for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He is
co-editor of the book "Deadline Artists: America's Greatest Newspaper
Columns.</span>
</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">
<span>(CNN)</span> -- <b style="color:rgb(255,0,0)">It turns out that Richard Nixon was a hippie.</b></p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Here's Tricky Dick's wisdom on taxation, always worth dusting off this time of year:</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">"We shall never make taxation popular, but we can make taxation fair."</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">See -- he's talking about
"fairness" -- and we all now know that's code for social justice
straight out of Saul Alinsky. And it was especially socialistic for him
to invoke the concept back in a time when the top tax rate was 70%.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Meanwhile, back in reality circa
2012, we are having a typically overheated election-year debate about
taxes -- and both teams in Washington have a point.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Republicans this side of Ronald
Reagan finally found a way to out-promise Democrats. After decades spent
griping that the New Deal's electoral power came from liberal's
limitless ability to promise public goodies, conservatives have realized
that they can tap into American's anti-tax impulse by promising to
lower taxes all the time, regardless of whether our nation is at war or
running a long-term deficit. Liberals have always had a hard time
appreciating that the American Revolution was founded in part on a tax
revolt.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">But historic perspective is the
enemy of partisan ideologues, and on the flip-side, conservatives who
idealize the past conveniently ignore that tax rates at the heart of the
American Century were almost double what they are today. That was an
outrage; by comparison, today's debates are about rounding errors.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Essentially, we are debating
whether the top tax rate should go back to where it was during the Bill
Clinton presidency -- 39.6%, up from the Bush tax cut level of 35%. And
this would apply only to households making more than $250,000 a year.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">I happen to think using that
threshold is a mistake. A family making 250k with two earners doesn't
deserve to be lumped in with the super-rich at the top tax rate. At the
same time, someone such as Mitt Romney, who makes $56,000 a day off
passive income from investments, shouldn't be taxed at just 14%.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Obama has a real weakness in this
year's debate, however. Read through his play-to-the-base budget, and
you'll see the term "fairness" advanced over and over again. Fairness is
a noble goal and contributes to societal stability in the long-run. But
the real argument for raising taxes is directly related to balancing
budgets and reducing long-term deficits and debt. And that argument is
rooted in rhetoric about the "shared sacrifice" needed to restore
national greatness. After all, the world's largest debtor nation cannot
remain the world's sole superpower for long.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Obama's fairness rhetoric bypasses
that rational argument in favor of something fluffier -- namely, closing
the growing gap between rich and poor via the tax code. This might
excite the liberal Democratic base, but it also serves to confirm
negative stereotypes about wealth redistribution and the left that
alienates independents and swing voters.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">On balance, I think policy
arguments about moving the top rate to people making more than a million
dollars a year makes good sense.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Republicans will balk out of
deference to philosophy and big campaign contributors, but even 52% of
self-identified tea partiers support that benchmark. It is an additional
irony that many conservatives are fine with raising taxes on those 47%
of Americans who don't make enough money to pay federal income taxes, as
long as top rates are lowered enough to make the overall shift revenue
neutral. This isn't tax policy as much as it has become a shell-game
masquerading as ideology.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Tax day is unpleasant, and it has
become a colossal waste of time and money. The current tax code is
roughly 10 times longer than the Bible, and Forbes estimates that 6.1
billion hours are wasted in trying to comply with its byzantine
structures.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">Both Obama and congressional
Republicans have campaigned on tax reform and tax simplification in the
past. The Bowles-Simpson Plan and the sadly abandoned Obama-Boehner
Grand Bargain imagined lowering rates and raising revenue by closing
loopholes. The real tragedy is that such an agreement should be within
reach -- but the 80% agreement keeps getting eclipsed by the 20%
disagreement, that signature, stubborn hyperpartisan insistence on all
or nothing. So we get nothing.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">That brings us back to Nixon's
aphorism: "We shall never make taxation popular but we can make taxation
fair." It's about the last piece of useful wisdom on the subject that
we've heard out of Washington.</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">
<span>Follow us on</span>
</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">
<span>Join us on</span><span>.</span>
</p>
<p class="cpf-printOut-body-content">The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of John Avlon.</p>
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<div class="cpf-undeletable" id="cpf-printOut-footer">
<div class="cpf-printOut-footer-copyright cpf-undeletable">© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.</div>
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