The last thing most Americans want to think about on April 16 is the income tax. But they ought to remember their frustration and anger over wrestling with the hopelessly complex, convoluted tax code on April 15 - and demand that Congress finally do something to simplify it.

Rep. Rob Portman, R-Terrace Park, has been trying for years to get his colleagues to pass a tax simplification plan, without success. Next month, he'll again offer legislation to repeal the increasingly unfair Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), simplify capital gains calculations, eliminate most phase-outs, exempt the first $500 in dividends and interest from itemizing, and weed out about 100 "deadwood" provisions.

This is not radical stuff, just good housecleaning. We may never get a complete overhaul that reduces April 15 to the postcard-size flat-tax form envisioned by former Rep. Dick Armey, but something must be done before the system's complexity creep chokes our economy.

The AMT is a perfect example. It was enacted in the early 1980s to make sure very wealthy Americans didn't manipulate their deductions and credits, but many middle-class taxpayers now are afflicted by it because Congress never adjusted it for inflation. It takes an average of 12 hours' work to figure out the AMT, which can wipe out benefits taxpayers thought they were getting. Repeal might cost the feds $500 billion over 10 years, but Congress may face a middle-class revolt unless it's fixed.

That's just one aspect of a system that has become so complex that a majority of lower-income, short-form families now need to hire tax preparers, according to a Wall Street Journal study. That just isn't right. It diminishes our confidence in the fairness of our tax system and our society. Taxpayers get a hopeless feeling that their own government is cheating them, and that only the rich can work it to their advantage.

That's not really true - the top one percent of taxpayers pays 37.4 percent of all taxes, while the bottom 50 percent pays only 3.9 percent of the nation's tax burden. Still, the perception of unfairness - and the reality, in the case of the AMT - remains. It must be addressed. Congress has been discussing tax simplification to death for years. It's time to do it.

The sorry numbers

What was for most Americans a simple, 34-line form in 1935 has morphed into colossal waste of time, money and productivity. Taxpayers spend more than 2.8 billion hours a year sifting through the 5.5-million-word, 703-form tax code and filling out 8 billion pages of IRS forms. The average American needs more than 24 hours of work to gather records and complete a 1040 form. Total yearly cost to the economy of filling out tax forms is more than $200 billion.