>>Disruption could also come from tax reform. I'd say that's the most appropriate place, really. It's a designed system, sort of. It's malleable, in that chang

>>Disruption could also come from tax reform. I'd say that's the most appropriate place, really. It's a designed system, sort of. It's malleable, in that changes occur regularly. The obvious place for bug fixes is here. I get your pessimism in the sense that the same dynamics, politics and systems that have shaped the present problem seem unlikely to have the desire/capability to fix it. OTOH, things stay the same until they don't. There have been a lot of tax systems invented over the last N thousand years. 99.N% of those tax codes are currently extinct. Also... we're due a shift of reigning economic religion, periodically speaking. Maybe the next one will take a differing view on efficiency. Stuff like taxes were always enigmas productivity-wise. For a mill, product-out/labour-in = labour productivity... or product-out/capital for capital efficiency. Either way, efficiency is self evident. For a tax code, legal system or whatnot, there's no way to measure output and no "economists agree" way to know the value of the output even if you could. It could be negative. Well... This now also applies also to JPMorgan, Pfizer, Alphabet, FB and such. Just like it's not obvious that more legal procedures = more justice, measurements of most of the economy's output is increasingly ethereal and unrelated to obvious scarcities. That don't mean nothing definite, but we are in times of change... which means don't bet on long term saminess of most things.