As Bruce Bartlett says, you need involvement of the President/Treasury to really get tax reform started. Even then, we can’t get business tax reform done by leaving out pass throughs who put pay business taxes on the individual income tax form. We also need to increase aid to middle class and poor taxpayers. Howard Gleckman talks about what Orin Hatch would do, which is not to provide any aid – not additional or baseline – for the poor and middle class (well, maybe the middle class – those who write the GOP checks. Hatch also poo-pooed anything with a VAT. Again, big mistake. Bill Gale talks about George Will’s piece, which I responded to at length (as well as to someone saying MMT is the answer – printing money rather than collecting tax for expenditure). He says we need it to fight crankiness, although many say immigration reform would do that – although my view is that America would be a lot less cranky with higher tax subsidies tor families (detecting a pattern anyone?). I also mention how the last tax reform law gave us the 2008 Depression (second mortgage deductibility giving us the mortgage ATM (not AMT)). I would not worry about using taxes to deal with carried interest – make it a stand alone, and as for Social Security, bury that in a Business Income Tax and have part of that give workers dividend producing (and votable) shares in their employing firms (and no on else’s). Michican needs to grow a spine instead of having voters approve their gas tax increase. They are cowardly and they may lose. I love the PUF and I may check the new one, although the one I used did a very good job at demostrating how debt should be considered backed by income taxes paid rather than a per capita basis. Indeed, the rich liberal states are better off (and under paying) with per-capita for obvious reasons, while the poor, like Orin Hatch’s state, are better off with the income tax based debt rather than the per capita basis their Tea Partiers seem to think is more constitutional (rather incorrectly of course). In other words, the debt clock is just plain wrong.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 08:45:58 +0000
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