During the last election cycle the politicians were all preaching the necessity for new tax system to increase the fairness and to reduce the complexity and the IRS. Now the rhetoric is over with.

The present tax system is totally overloaded with special treatments, exemptions, exceptions and a tax code of 10,000 pages that not even the IRS understands and apply consistently. And this complexity has real consequences. Billions of dollars are wasted annually for tax preparers, tax accountants and tax lawyers.

What are the politicians actually doing about this? As usual they are just continuing to hang more ornaments on the already overloaded tree.

1. A new $500 dollar tax rebate for each child in a family. This should buy lots of votes as this is a gift for about 50 million families and 100 million voters. Families with children already receive tax exemptions for their children. Is our country underpopulated creating the need for additional incentives to have children?

2. To further add to this Christmas tree it is proposed that we have some new educational tax credits.

3. New special treatment of capital gains income by a special reduced tax rate for capital gains. Why should this be treated any different than any other income.. It would be much more logical to treat this income the same as other income but stop taxing phantom capital gains income created by inflation. Under the present tax code it is perfectly possible to owe taxes when you actually suffer a capital loss.

4. Reduce the inheritance tax. Does this really make sense except that it is a pay back to the large campaign contributors. In recent decades the amount of wealth concentrated in the hands of the top 1% of the population has almost doubled. Over 40% of the national wealth is presently owned by only 1% of the population. Lets not kid ourselves. In this society money is power. Do we really want to further encourage greater concentration of wealth and it's attendant concentration of power in the hands of a few.