Just this week, the Tax Justice Network published a report claiming that between $21 and $31 trillion of global financial wealth is “invested” in tax-free havens. That’s more than the GDP of the United States, China, and Japan combined.

President Bush is leading a major tax code overhaul. For more than two decades, a growing number of free-market economists and conservative politicians have been planning to overthrow the entire federal taxation system. If successful, these radical reformers would effectively shift the burden of taxation from wealth onto wages and therefore onto lowerincome Americans. This idea is known as the consumption tax.