That may be so, but the president said when he named a bipartisan panel to study the alternatives to the current tax system, in January, that he was committed to putting tax reform on a fast track. “This is an essential task for our country,” Bush said. While the details of his tax reform package remained under wraps as Worth went to press, Bush outlined a few broad parameters. He wants the overhaul to be revenue-neutral, and he wants to retain deductions for mortgage interest and charitable donations. He also wants to make permanent the income and estate tax cuts he engineered in his first term. His appetite for more radical reform is unclear, but during his reelection campaign, he called a national sales tax proposal an “interesting” idea.

Many agree that the present tax system has become complex and unwieldy. Between 1995 and 2004, the total number of pages in the tax code, including regulations and IRS rules, increased by almost 50 percent, as has the average time needed to complete the forms. “The tax system is broken,” says Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank in Dallas. “It is in dire need of simplification. There is growing tax evasion and glaring problems on the corporate side that are eroding the tax base,” he adds. “And it’s inefficient, because investment and other economic activities are being dictated by the tax code instead of the free market.”

While complying with the federal tax system has become more difficult, tax rates themselves have been trending down. In 2001, Bush signed into law the largest income tax cuts since 1981, and in 2003 he lowered the maximum tax rate on capital gains and dividends to 15 percent. “A lot of people considered Reagan’s 1986 overhaul the last major tax reform,” Edwards says. “But most of George W. Bush’s supporters consider his tax cuts as very real reforms.”