To tax plans old and new, I bring the certainty of a famous New Yorker cartoon. Three staff members are reporting to their senator. The senior staffer sums up: “Sir, we've come to the conclusion that it's absolutely impossible to assemble a tax plan that doesn't benefit the rich.”

At the threshold, I am told, I am to assume that in fall 1995, effective January 1, 1996, the 104th Congress enacts and President Clinton signs into law the USA Tax Act of 1995, S. 722, precisely in the 290-page form this grand legislation was introduced on April 25, 1995 by Senators Sam Nunn (Democratic-Georgia), Pete Domenici (Republican-New Mexico), and Bob Kerrey (Democratic-Nebraska). This exorbitant assumption embraced, my task is to imagine plausible answers to the simple question, “And then what happened?”

Forecasting the tax bar's delighted response to a truly sweeping and novel legislative proposal barely off the ground is great fun. The legislation seems unlikely of enactment, surely unlikely of enactment in the form introduced, and therefore none ever will prove how wrong I was. Thus comforted, I proceed to a selective review of S. 722 and then hazard some tax planner responses, but preface the entire exercise with what is intended as a provoking observation. The Nunn-Domenici tax world is one in which municipal bonds pay interest in even years only, executive compensation and the yield on at least one class of each corporation's stock is paid only in odd years, and the rich with borrowed money buy raw land or works of art they admire but may not expect to keep forever.