As Congress and the Trump administration turn their sights on overhauling the tax code, it’s a good time to think about the great three-dimensional brain twister of the 1980s, the Rubik’s Cube.

That’s partly because the first and last time there was a comprehensive rewrite of the tax code, it was 1986. But there is more than that.

What makes trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube so exasperating is that every rotation you make to align the colors on one side messes up something on one of the other sides. Nothing moves in isolation; everything affects everything else, and rarely for the better.

The 1986 tax overhaul took two years. Despite bipartisan backing from the Reagan administration and congressional Democrats, it had many false starts and reversals in its voyage to becoming a law.