Here’s a very interesting idea from Mitt Romney (poorly explained by the ABC News writeup), instead of raising revenue by eliminating tax deductions just cap the overall amount of deductions a person is allowed to claim.
That has most of the virtues of normal proposals to raise revenue by eliminating deductions, but ducks some of the political problems. The big advantage is that since no particular deduction is eliminated, you don’t reap the fury of the impacted interest groups in the same way. Whether that would really work in practice or not, I can’t quite say but it’s worth a shot.
