Long-Term Tax Advice

According to Yablon, "over the last thirty-five years, American tax laws have changed to reflect a citizenry that has generally become more individualistic, less honest, more sophisticated, less honorable, more worshipful of wealth and less caring about the opinions of others. Most obvious are three related trends:

• First, tax laws have increasingly been used by politicians to grant financial benefits to favored parties in a manner that is harder to discern and easier to enact than direct appropriations.
• Second, tax laws are now always subject to effectively capricious revision or repeal; the institutional reluctance to change important things without good reason that was generally present in earlier times has been severely eroded.
• Third, largely in response to aggressive behavior by tax professionals, broad principles have been replaced with or supplemented by a multitude of very specific rules, exceptions to rules and exceptions to the exceptions.

The overall result is a level of complexity that would be regarded as unquestionably insane if it had occurred all at once rather than accumulating over decades."

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