During the campaign and since his re-election, President Bush has placed reform of the tax code high on his list of objectives.

He’s often talked about simplifying tax laws, making them fairer and perhaps even overhauling how taxes are collected. The idea of a flat tax or national sales tax has even been floated, but appears to be losing support.

Last week, some details of the president’s plans were described in a Washington Post story by Jonathan Weisman and Jeffrey Birnbaum. In their Nov. 18 report, they wrote that the president would like to “drastically cut, if not eliminate, taxes on savings and investments.”

President Bush plans to appoint a commission to study tax reform and evaluate various proposals. But he’s already talking about an outline for his plans. According to the Post, Bush wants to end taxation on interest, dividends and capital gains, and to expand tax breaks for business investment. Because the plan is supposed to be revenue-neutral, the administration says it would pay for these tax cuts by eliminating the deduction of state and local taxes from federal income taxes and ending the business tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance.

The changes would shift the tax burden even more from the wealthy to middle and lower-middle class workers and would greatly reduce the incentive for employers to provide health insurance to their workers. Simply, it’s a terrible idea and everyone who works for a living should resist it.

Already, 45 million Americans don’t have health insurance. By making it more expensive for businesses to offer insurance, more people would find themselves without. That’s almost criminal.

By ending taxation on interest, dividends and capital gains, we could expect higher taxes on wages. And efforts to end the deduction of local and state taxes hit high-tax states like Maine disproportionately hard.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which studied Internal Revenue Service data from 2000, only one in five taxpayers with incomes less than $100,000 reported any dividend income. Meanwhile, more than seven in 10 taxpayers with income between $100,000 and $1 million reported dividend income, and virtually all taxpayers with incomes more than $1 million reported dividend income. For those with income more than $1 million who reported dividend income, the average from that one source was $75,000.

A similar study by New York University economist Edward Wolff found that about 85 percent of the value of taxable stocks and mutual funds were held by the top 10 percent of households, and the top 1 percent of households held almost 50 percent.

Are these the people who really need another tax break? At the expense of people making less than $100,000?

Nothing’s written in stone, so the details could all change. But the information provided to the Washington Post shows the general direction the administration is headed. And it looks bad.

In a revenue-neutral plan, like the one proposed by the president, every tax cut is offset by a tax increase. For every winner, there’s a loser. If the president holds true to these plans, the winners will be folks with plenty of money. The losers will be people who work for a living.