Yes and no. I agree that the rules are badly written, but that is, in and of itself, apparently due to a fairly interesting example of regulatory capture.

The system provides *extremely* strong incentives for the rich to do everything feasible to influence elections in a way that favors their tax situation. (Mostly in small ways -- buying influence to get loopholes written in -- but sometimes in larger ones like the big capital-gains cut some years back or the current top-end-bracket fight.) That's a larger-scale game, which has been playing out over the course of decades. Along the way, it's done no small collateral damage to the system as a whole, admittedly as just one of a collection of problematic tweaks.

Mind, I'm not positing any grand conspiracies or anything like that -- it doesn't require anything more than rich people acting in their own self-interest, with each step entirely legal. But from a system dynamics POV, such things can gradually unbalance. That appears to be the case here, and I suspect that the rebalancing won't be pretty. (Historically, it tends not to be.)