Once the 48-hour media freakout subsides, the number of people genuinely outraged, or even surprised, by Trump's tax returns will be smaller than the number of people outraged that confidential tax information was stolen and leaked to the media.

The public would be wise to be more angry about the leaking of confidential information. If nothing in Trump's taxes is illegal, there's no real story there. The media will try to keep it alive by manufacturing secondary stories about reactions to the original story.

They'll lavishly quote performative outrage from Democrats or whip up "THE INTERNET IS ON FIRE ABOUT TRUMP'S TAXES!" stories that quote five tweets, but working Americans just won't see anything relevant to their lives or the big issues in the election.

But this stuff about leaking confidential information? That's a real threat to you and me, Mom and Pop America. The totalitarian Democrat Party has weaponized every element of government and media to serve its political interests. That IS a big story - one of the biggest.

They can, and will, do this stuff to average working people too. Little People who become inconvenient to powerful Democrats have a way of getting crushed by bizarrely aggressive bureaucrats and mysterious disclosures of confidential information.

From Russiagate to the tax story, the Trump years have seen repeated abuses of power by Democrats in top offices, while they constantly abuse Trump of "abusing power" simply by fulfilling the constitutional duties of his office. The REAL abuses are all coming from the Left.

Then there's the inherently totalitarian idea that people from the "wrong" Party aren't allowed to take full advantage of our ridiculously convoluted tax laws, or other regulatory systems. Trump's taxes are nothing compared to the accounting tricks used by left-wing Hollywood.

We get selective outrage at people for lawfully "avoiding" taxes, but the same people would fight like wildcats to thwart any serious effort at reforming the tax system. There is zero anger at the politicians who wrote and passed the laws Trump followed.

The whole notion of "tax avoidance" as a sin against Big Government is totalitarianism in action. People who lack the proper Party credentials are attacked for following the actual written law instead of imaginary, subjective rules. Politics are held higher than the law.

That's a far more relevant danger for working Americans than vague complaints that one guy didn't pay as much in income tax as people think he should. The Politicization of Everything is affecting every American's life RIGHT NOW. It's a real threat we should be addressing.

I'm all in favor of a radically simplified tax system that would be more focused on fairly collecting the income needed for necessary government, and less on using the tax code as an instrument for manipulating America's economy and society.

I'm all in favor of a system that would save us billions in compliance and enforcement costs for an incomprehensible maze of rules and exceptions - and no, the rules don't become "loopholes" just because you suddenly decide you don't like the way someone uses them.

I would very much like to take the tax system away from the totalitarians - but no matter how loudly they complain about political infidels "gaming" the system to "avoid" paying taxes, they will never, ever surrender the vast power they gain from the system as it stands.

I would wager none of the people shrieking about Trump's taxes could name a single rule he followed that should be changed, or explain how they would reform it. Many of those rules were put there by Democrats, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

We're supposed to take the Trump tax story as a reason to vote against the guy who followed all the rules... and vote for the guy who wrote them, over the course of his half-century political career, the guy who wants to make the rules even more complex and burdensome. /end