Remarks to the Mortgage Bankers Association of America

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, March 9, 1998

As of February the 20th, less than 2 weeks ago, 10.7 million Americans had filed their tax returns electronically for this year; that's a 19 percent increase over last year. Three-point-eight million Americans have filed by telephone; that's a 25 percent increase over last year. The average telephone conversation is 10 minutes. I think that's pretty good, and I hope more will continue to do that.

We are having problem resolution days, which have been widely publicized by the media, and I thank them for that. In every IRS district, at least once a month, where the IRS employees are open - they open the offices at night or on the weekends - people come in with their tax problems, and we try to resolve them in a quick and informal way.

I think all these things are very important. We just approved new regulations to protect so-called innocent spouses who are left with tax liabilities by their spouses, that they had no role in undertaking. Now, there's more to do, but a lot has been done. Among the new reforms proposed are new citizen advocacy panels, new systems to file taxes by phone or computer to make it even more easy and more widely used, stronger taxpayer advocates, phone lines open 24 hours a day, further relief for innocent taxpayers.

Late last year the House passed these reforms almost unanimously. I think there were over 400 votes for them, and only 3 or 4 against. So again let me say, I hope that the Senate will quickly pass this legislation and send it to me for my signature. It's a good bill, and it will do a lot of good for Americans.

Now, we need to continue to do these kinds of things, and we need to be open to broader reforms of the tax system. But there are some people in Congress who have made a proposal that I think would not fit within the formula of economic discipline and confidence that I believe we have to stay with. Under the guise of reform, they have proposed what, to me, is an irresponsible scheme - to eliminate our tax laws without any system to replace them.

Now, at first glance, this might look good. "Sunset the Tax Code. When everybody knows there will be no more Tax Code, that will shake everyone up, and then they will come forward with a responsible alternative. And trust me, everything will be fine." That's the message. Once you know that the old code is gone and on a date certain it won't be there, well, everyone will surely have to come up with something, and it must be something that will be better. "Don't worry about the details." That's what this proposal is, and it has a lot of appeal. It's like saying you can't go on a diet until the refrigerator is empty. But if you think about it, it only works if you know that you can fill the refrigerator up again and what will be in there.

Now, instead of proposing reform, this proposal is really economic uncertainty. What we have done is to restore some confidence and predictability to the American economy. When you knew that we were going to stay on a path of fiscal discipline and the deficit was not going to go to $300 billion a year, was not going to go to $370 billion a year - which was what it was predicted to be for this year when I took office - instead of $10 billion or zero, which is what it's going to be, this is a way of going back to that era - a total economic uncertainty.