Bush Never Fixed Tax Code “Mess”
(CBS)
On this final tax filing day of George Bush’s presidency, his campaign promise to fix the “complicated mess” that is the U.S. Tax Code remains unfulfilled.
In 2004, he ran for re-election asserting that the American people deserve – and the U.S. economy demands – “a simpler, fairer, pro-growth system.”
He used his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that year to decry the tax code as “a complicated mess, filled with special interest loopholes, saddling our people with more than six billion hours of paperwork and headache every year.”
He promised that in his second term, he would “lead a bipartisan effort to reform and simplify the federal tax code.”
A couple of weeks before his Inauguration, he established a Presidential panel to advise him on ways to reform the tax code. It reported its recommendations on Nov. 1, 2005. But its ideas have been gathering dust ever since.
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