In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee ten days ago, tax expert Daniel Shaviro described the current taxation situation in the United States as a "perfect storm" for tax reform. He's right, and it's about time. Our last major tax reform came in 1986, when Congress set out to accomplish the most vaunted goal of any tax reform attempt: broadening the tax base while lowering tax rates in an attempt to improve the system yet maintain revenue collection. They broadened the base by eliminating a number of "tax expenditures," loopholes in the tax code that the tax literate jump through to lower their tax burden relative to their less savvy peers.

But since 1986, the number of tax expenditures has slowly crept back up, and now stands at 172 according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. By adding up JCT's revenue loss estimates for all of them, one arrives at a total of $1 trillion a year in forgone revenue (though it is imprecise to add the numbers.) Not only is that an awful lot of money, tax expenditures have many shortcomings--they are distortive, regressive and receive too little oversight.

So tax expenditures are one section of the code that could stand to be reformed. But, as Shaviro and his co-panelists pointed out, there are numerous others. Corporate taxation is horribly complex, causing businesses to waste time and money and make suboptimal decisions. Individual and Corporate income tax compliance costs Americans billions of dollars worth of time and money each year. And, worst of all, despite all of the effort that goes into complying with it, our tax system fails to cover the costs of running the government, as we run deficit after deficit.

The coming presidential election needs to be a forum to address these issues, as well as many others facing the nation. We can't continue to allow our tax code to become more complicated and special-interest oriented; we need to simplify and streamline it, and make it work for the average American. To hear more about ways we can do that, I will be attending this forum, hosted by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in association with American University and the Tax Foundation. Tax reform is only one of the topics they'll be discussing; they'll also be addressing climate change and health care reform. The panels are going to be credibly bipartisan, so I'll have my ears open to answers from both sides of the debate. With problems this big, the answers are going to involve compromise, and this event should give some sense of the contours of the compromises that may eventually be reached.