“The dirty little secret is that the largest special interests are us — the vast majority of U.S. taxpayers,”

Wonderful, wonderful quote from a NY Times article on the IRS calling for tax simplification.  This is something that everything I know about government points to being the problem.  The reason it is so difficult to trim programs and get rid of wasteful, destructive programs is that most of the worst programs are the ones that benefit the widest number of people, or a very large concentrated minority such as agricultural subsidies, at the expense of the minority that doesn't benefit from them, often the poor.  The home mortgage interest deduction being the primary offender but hardly the only one.