They called it Levelland

Get ready for the flat tax. In his remarks yesterday, President Bush said he's looking to make the tax code "simpler and fairer" as he reforms the "outdated" tax code.

This was predicted by John Cassidy in the New Yorker about two months ago, though Cassidy's remarks were read primarily by coastal liberals who didn't elect Bush.

Also read chiefly on the coasts were Andrew Sullivan's "The Simple Solution" (January 2000), which attempted to make the flat tax appealing rather than appalling to liberals, and James Surowiecki's immediate rebuttal. (The two continued to squabble here.)

While the flat tax has been a conservative holy grail for many years, I wonder how it will play in reality. Bush carried a lot of relatively poor states. Will he and his party lose support in those places when working people realize that their take-home pay is shrinking?

Read my lips: the flat tax will hurt working Americans. If Bush and his people can push it through, tax policy could be the biggest issue in the 2008 campaign.