Final Jeopardy!”

Category: Business & Industry.

The Answer: Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year.

Ken Jennings’ response: What is Fed-Ex?

Correct answer: What is H&R Block?

It’s ironic indeed that Ken Jennings — probably the man most in need of a tax adviser after earning more than $2.5 million in 74 straight Jeopardy victories — broke his streak last November by failing to identify the country’s largest tax preparer.

Who could blame him? The episode was probably taped during the summer, and who was thinking about tax preparation then?

But now you’re thinking about it. W-2s from summer jobs you’d forgotten you had are arriving in the mail, and weekly reminders to file out the FAFSA keep popping up in your inbox.

President Bush knows you’re thinking about your taxes, too. He’s been flying around the country making derisive jokes about the Internal Revenue Service, complaining about how the tax code is 60,000 pages long and promoting some vague kind of tax reform. Not a bad political maneuver, considering that the IRS is about as popular as crow poop.

Naturally, the Democrats have taken the side of the crow poop. They’re already decrying President Bush’s plan, claiming it will be a boon to corporate bigwigs, that it will destroy the middle class, and that we’re headed toward another Great Depression. Never mind that Bush has no plan. He has a commission.

Last week, President Bush appointed former Sens. Connie Mack and John Breaux to lead a bipartisan nine-member commission to study tax simplification.

This is the first sign that Bush is not serious about tax simplification. Commissions are what presidents create when they want to avoid taking action on an issue. The president gets the praise for sensing the acuteness of the problem. The commission gets the blame for proposing the unpopular solution.

If Bush really wanted to reform the tax code, he would make his move now while anti-tax fervor is high. Why have a commission deliberate until mid-summer? Furthermore, any regular Joe (or Jane) can tell you that nine politicians in one room is a recipe for tax complication, not simplification.

So Bush is dropping the ball, and likewise, the Democrats are failing to recover the fumble. Perhaps if they weren’t in a self-imposed state of catatonic nostalgia, the Democrats would propose their own tax simplification plan.

Since I’m sure they won’t take my advice, let me spell out what their plan should look like: it would treat income from wages and income from investment equally; it would eliminate all loopholes and taxshelters; it would do away with all deductions, except those for homeowner’s interest, medical expenses and charitable giving; it would include personal exemptions large enough to preclude the poor from paying taxes and it would preserve the progressive tax rate structure.

Such a proposal would be immensely more fair than the current system, where the rich pay thousands of dollars to loophole-locating tax attorneys to save them from paying millions in taxes. It would also be more efficient in that it would take less to implement than the $9.8 billion and 990,000 IRS employees required to administer the current tax code. It would be less annoying, too, consuming considerably less time than the six billion hours and $200 billion Americans are estimated to spend annually on their taxes.

If the Democrats ever offered such a proposal, Republicans would be forced to produce a counter-proposal, probably calling for more incentives to invest and lower tax rates. Public expectations would rise, and Bush would be forced to demand a compromise bill he can sign.

Unfortunately, that scenario is about as likely as my beating Ken Jennings’ record on Jeopardy.