"It is true the Republicans control the House and Senate, but we have a number of Republicans who are not conservative," Cannon said.

He insists Congress and state governments can and should do a better job of cutting taxes. Congress needs to be thinking about functions it wants government to have and what functions it wants eliminated, he said.

Delegation members seem to agree the time is ripe to embrace President Bush's call for tax reforms, although no one knows exactly what those reforms will be.

Bennett believes reforming tax laws will be difficult at best.

"Finding 51 senators who agree there needs to be tax reform will be easy," he said. "But it is not so easy finding 51 who agree on what that reform should be."

Matheson said there are small steps Congress can take to keep faith with taxpayers: making permanent the tax reforms already passed, eliminating the marriage penalty and lowering the tax rate for low-income people from 15 percent to 10 percent.

The bigger issue, Matheson said, is that most people feel the tax code is inherently unfair. Every taxpayer recognizes that changes to the code over the years have made the system more and more complicated and more and more susceptible to abuses by special interests. "Let's throw it out and start over with a simpler and more fair system."

Bennett agrees the current system is "a mess" created by 60 years of congressional tinkering to the point no one, "not the IRS, not the accountants who prepare your taxes" really understand what the law requires.

"My philosophical position is we should stop trying to be fair and pick winners and losers," he said. "Let's pick a system that is efficient, causes the least distortion in the economy, is the easiest to collect and is as simple as possible. Fairness will emerge as a byproduct."

The Tax Foundation study was based on an analysis of incomes related to Net National Product. Other groups use different statistical approaches, including personal income and gross domestic product. The differences in the results are usually around 1 percent, which is "fairly trivial," Hodge said.

The bottom line, the study found, is that Tax Freedom Day has begun to creep back up after falling every year since reaching a high in 2000 when Tax Freedom Day was May 3.

A century before, in 1900, Tax Freedom Day was Jan. 22.

---

E-mail: spang@desnews.com