I have covered a lot of news events over the past 25 years on Capitol Hill that have been very interesting.  But one area where it has been almost all talk and no action is on tax reform.

The last time that Congress undertook a substantive effort to reform the federal tax code was in 1986, a move that had major supporters in both parties.

The plan streamlined and consolidated both income tax brackets and deductions, and moved to eliminate a number of special tax shelters.

Since 1986, there has been a lot of work done by the Congress on tax changes, but very little has been done in terms of tax simplification and overall tax reform.

"Every year taxpayers and elected officials complain about the tax law's complexity," says National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson.

"But despite the exasperation, no significant simplification has occurred since the landmark Tax Reform Act of 1986."

Instead, as Olson observed in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week, all the Congress does is make things more complicated by adding on new changes almost every year.

So why hasn't the Congress acted?  

One easy answer is that tax reform encounters resistance in both political parties.  Democrats and Republicans have entrenched interests in various parts of the tax code, so while calls for "tax reform" make a lot of sense to the voters, they don't make as much sense to all politicians.

Democrats were cool to the idea of further tax reform when they ran the show in Congress for many years, just as Republicans never really got moving on the idea either.

President Bush convened a panel that made recommendations on tax reform, but those ideas are gathering dust on the office shelves of think tanks around Washington, D.C.

Yes, Republicans may have done more to cut taxes over the last quarter century than Democrats, but cutting taxes is not the same as reforming the system to make it easier to deal with.

Many of my readers and listeners have probably heard Neal Boortz call for action on The Fair Tax, which has been bubbling in GOP circles for a number of years in Congress.

But even when Republicans were in charge in Congress, the Fair Tax issue was never brought to the floor for a vote.

So as protestors gather in Washington, D.C. today to call for change on taxes, it is going to take a lot of pressure to make sure that tax reform occurs once in the next 25 years.

We'll see how many people turn out in the nation's capital today for these tax rallies, and whether it has any impact or not.