The Washington Examiner argues that certain activities of the federal government such as national security should be shrouded in secrecy, but the tax reform process initiated by Sens. Orrin Hatch and Max Baucus isn’t one of them.
Believe it or not, the finance panel’s chairman, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and ranking minority member, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, recently assured their senatorial colleagues that nobody will know for 50 years who proposed what concerning which tax credits and deductions should be kept and which should be killed.
It is hard to imagine a better illustration of business-as-usual by Washington’s professional politicians than having two grizzled Senate veterans promising to protect the identities of fellow senators protecting special interests as the tax-writing committees in Congress make decisions on things like home mortgage deductions and corporate tax breaks worth trillions of dollars. As Taxpayers for Common Sense recently observed, “we hear it all the time from policymakers. Trust us to do a better job for the taxpayer if we do it behind closed doors — less histrionics, less playing to the camera, less political posturing, and less need to appeal to constituents and special interests.”
