WHY THE TAX FILING SIMPLIFICATION ACT OF 2016 WILL GO NOWHERE

There has been no news at all about the Tax Filing Simplification Act of 2016 since it was announced, with some fanfare, right around tax day.  I predict that it will go nowhere.  Why?  Not because the tax preparation industry is fighting tooth and nail to stop it (although they could be for all I know), but because it’s a bad idea.  
The announcement was pure political grandstanding, casting the tax preparation industry as a villain standing in the way of help from the benevolent government.  But the real villain is the government.  The government is responsible for the mess that is the Internal Revenue Code, and the resulting morass encountered by tax return filers every April.