Consider the impact on special interests.
Most of those 45,000 pages of the tax code reflect special treatments and deductions for businesses, particular types of investment, or behavior. This stuff got in there and regularly gets modified and changed as a result of various special interests working their magic.
The number of registered lobbyists in Washington doubled over the last eight years from 17,000 to over 34,000. A good chunk of their business is generated by proposed additions or changes to the tax code.
If you listen to Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, with all the talk of reducing lobbyists' influence, most of their pitch is using the tax code for their social engineering programs.
I say get rid of the code, the Internal Revenue Service and the lobbyists.
Ironically, the major reason why the national retail sales tax gets so little attention is because insiders deem it politically impossible to achieve. Those who are part of the problem don't want the solution. The tax code is now one huge special-interest honey pot and the swarming bees want to keep it that way.
The best reply to this challenge came from the Republicans' own "yes, we can" man, Mike Huckabee.
When NBC's Tim Russert challenged Huckabee on the political likelihood of the Fair Tax, Huckabee's response was:
"... Tim, ... everybody talks about how unlikely these things are. That's what's wrong in America. We're always talking about what we can't do."
Are we really at the point where major reforms are no longer possible in this country?
Republicans ought to get behind this "yes, we can" plan with beef.