Tax Expert Says Everyone's Too Obsessed With Taxes

Edward Kleinbard knows as much about taxation in America as anyone alive. He was a tax partner at the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, then chief of staff of U.S. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, and is now a professor at the University of Southern California’s law school. But when he set out to write a book about how to fix the American tax system, it made him realize that the problem wasn’t the tax system; it’s everyone’s fixation on the tax system.

Republican obsession with taxes is the more explicit: They want simply to cut them. Kleinbard is a staunch Democrat, and his new book, We Are Better Than This, has little patience with the economic and philosophical tenets of modern American conservativism. But Democrats have their own tax obsession, as he sees it: They want to aim taxes at the wealthy, to make them pay a greater share of the take. They rail against companies that figure out ways to minimize their corporate taxes. That focus, Kleinbard argues, is misguided: