If John Kerry ends up losing this election, it may not be so much because of what he did as what he didn't do. By overemphasizing his Vietnam record, he chose to ignore issues on which George W. Bush potentially is vulnerable. Among these is tax reform.

 Tax reform has been one of the best issues Republicans have had over the last 20 years or so. No wonder. Every poll that has ever been done has shown deep dissatisfaction with the tax system, quite apart from the burden of taxation. In other words, the way we raise revenue bothers people almost as much as the amount it takes out of their pockets.

 Historically, tax reform was primarily a liberal Democratic issue. Under the leadership of tax experts like Stanley Surrey and Joseph Pechman, Democrats in Congress rammed the tax reform acts of 1969 and 1976 down the throats of two Republican presidents. The main goal of these bills was to soak the rich by taking away their tax loopholes.

 In the early 1980s, Republicans and conservatives joined the tax reform fight, using loophole-closing for tax rate reductions. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 brought the top tax rate down to just 28 percent -- its lowest level since the 1920s. This constituted a marriage of Republican and Democratic views of tax reform.

 Unfortunately, there was a divorce shortly thereafter. George H.W. Bush abandoned Ronald Reagan's vision by endorsing higher tax rates in 1990 and was joined by the leading Democratic tax reformer, Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey. Like Lucy and the football, we were promised lower rates in return for losing loopholes. But shortly thereafter, the football was pulled away and rates were raised without restoring the loopholes. The 1993 tax increase under Bill Clinton completed the double-cross.

 Most Republicans still wanted tax reform, but unfortunately split into two competing camps -- those supporting a flat-rate tax and those favoring a national retail sales tax. The result was a dissipation of support for any reform. After 1994, when Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time in two generations, their interest in tax reform evaporated. They liked being able to add special provisions to the tax code to benefit their friends, and did so with abandon. Republicans channeled what was left of their tax reform agenda into scapegoating the Internal Revenue Service, blaming it for all the sins of the tax law.

 Unfortunately, George W. Bush has never spelled out a tax reform agenda. The many tax bills he got through Congress have mostly made the tax code more complicated. Reports by the Economic Policy Institute on the left and the National Taxpayers Union on the right agree on this point, if little else.

 Villanova University law professor James Maule notes that even as President Bush was proposing a tax reform commission at the Republican convention, he also endorsed more special provisions for the tax code. "So which is it?" Maule asked. "The tax code is complicated and needs to be simplified? Or the tax code should be made more complex by adding at least two more special provisions?" Continued...