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Tomorrow, October 22^nd, is the 25^th anniversary of the date President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Tax Reform Act of 1986 - “the most sweeping revision in the history of tax law”.

TRA 86 was billed as “tax simplification”.  It did simplify some things – reducing the number of tax brackets from 14 to 2 and eliminating and limiting certain deductions and tax calculation methods - but it also instituted complicated passive activity rules and started the ball rolling on limitations based on an AGI income.

I wrote a guest post on the Act for Peter J Reilly, CPA, author of the, coincidently, PASSIVE ACTIVIES blog at FORBES.COM.

Click here to check out my guest post.

The guest post ends on the prospects for another major tax reform in the near future.  After writing the item I came across an excellent list of the ingredients for tax reform from former Senator Bill Bradley (click here for the source) -

“Tax reform requires presidential leadership, an empowered Treasury Secretary, enthusiastic chairs of congressional tax writing committees, and a ‘zealot’ to push it.”

None of these items are currently in place.

And as further commentary on the prospects let me repeat something that I recently referenced in a BUZZ installment.  It seems all of the idiots in Congress want to close “tax loopholes” and do away with “tax expenditures” – except, of course, for the ones they personally helped create (click here for source).