Tax Reform this year? Fahgedabootit ..

The top House Democratic tax writer, Sandy Levin, vowed today to fight hard against the sort of tax-code overhaul the Republican majority wants. He says  the GOP plan, eliminating some so-far-unspecified tax breaks to offset the cost of reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, would end up hurting the poor because “you would have to eliminate virtually every tax incentive for middle income and poor families.”

His comments, to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, suggest that this year’s early optimism about a bipartisan approach to simplifying the tax code may have been overblown.