If Berry Thinks Tax Code is Complicated, He Should Criticize His Board, Funders

Todd Berry, the head of the conservative Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance who must be on the speed dial of every reporter in Wisconsin, wound up in a story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the IRS plan to begin regulation of paid tax preparers.

Berry blamed the complexity of the tax code this way: “The reason we have to use them is simply that Congress and the Wisconsin Legislature view the tax code as a Christmas tree. They make it unnecessarily complicated.”

Nice dodge.  Attack never defend, goes the adage, but let’€™s not try and pull a fast one, Mr. Berry.

If you want to blame someone for the unnecessarily complex tax code, blame the corporations who have spent gazillions lobbying to get conservative Republicans and short-sighted pro-corporate Democrats to enact tax policies that hand as much of our treasury over to big biz and the wealthy as humanly possible.

These require complicated tax schemes and regulations that chip away at the corporate tax code and allow people to ship untold billions into off-shore tax havens and no-corporate-tax states like Delaware and Nevada.

And those corporate interests behind this complicating of the tax policy would be the same corporate interests and banksters that make up the industries long-time represented on the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance board of directors.

Y’€™know, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.