David Brooks is hopeful (and I am too)

From the New York Times op-ed pages:

I have a vision.

Sometime over the next couple of weeks, President Obama issues a statement that reads: “Over the past several months, Republicans and Democrats have been fighting over what to do with the Bush tax cuts. I have my own views, but it’s not worth having a big fight over a tax code we all hate. Therefore, I’m suspending this debate. We will extend the Bush rates for everybody for one year, along with unemployment benefits. But during that year we will enact a comprehensive tax reform plan.

“The plan we will work on this year will look a bit like the 1986 reform plan. We will clean out the loopholes. We will take on the special interests. We will lower rates and make the tax code fair.”

Then Obama asks his aides to come up with a tax reform proposal he can lay before Congress. The State of the Union, he knows, is the one big chance he will have to redefine himself before the American people. On the big night, Obama stands before Congress. He gestures over to a giant stack of papers. “This is our tax code,” he tells the American people. “It’s rotten and we’re scrapping it.”

Then the president outlines his own proposal. It looks a bit like the plan hatched by Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, and Judd Gregg, the outgoing Republican senator from New Hampshire.