I certainly wasn't saying that the current income tax is the best we can do. If I thought that was true, I'd find another line of work. My point is that it's easy to bash the income tax (Howard's column actually wrote itself), but the favorite idea of many would-be tax reformers--a consumption tax--would shift tax burdens away from those most able to pay onto the middle class. And even though a theoretically pure consumption tax beats a theoretically pure income tax in simple economic models, a real-world consumption tax would probably not be much of an improvement. Exempting capital income from tax would create an enormous loophole--one lawyers and financial planners could drive a truck through. And it would surely be ridden with tax preferences and unnecessary complexities.