And they are where Congress should focus its reform efforts. Those tax preferences are where the money is, whether Congress wants to finance rate cuts, deficit reduction, or new spending. The real problems on the individual side of the tax code are preferences such as the mortgage interest deduction, the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI), and the multitudinous tax subsidies for many forms of saving. It is vastly bigger than a handful of city slickers taking advantage of the alpaca shelter. It is rather the trillion dollars-plus of annual tax breaks that Congress explicitly enacted to benefit nearly all Americans in one way or another. Nor is it “loopholes,” a word that misleadingly implies that Congress could fix the tax code by simply eliminating those provisions that clever lawyers have learned to manipulate. ![]() That’s because the real problem isn’t silly little special interest tax breaks. But Congress could repeal them all and it would add little to quality of the revenue code-or to Treasury’s coffers. It may be a good idea to shear alpaca shelters, deductions for telemarketers, subsidies for chicken poop, and tax-exempt bond financed mega malls and golf courses. Tax breaks for alpaca farmers (or are they ranchers?) are amusing, and the cute cousins of llamas make for attention-getting pictures, but they are trivial compared to the real flaws in the tax code. It never hurts to point out some of the worst, but Flake, perhaps unintentionally, is doing tax reform a disservice by focusing on a handful of relatively insignificant deductions and exclusions. ![]() ![]() Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) is generating some buzz for publishing a 56-page report on what he considers the most egregious preferences in the tax code.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |