This is indeed what the GOP should do!
Steve Forbes, Forbes
Mr. Speaker: We are losing the cliff war in terms of public opinion, but the tables can be turned. A few days ago you offered tax increases via eliminating or capping deductions. Your generous gesture won no goodwill from Democrats and the mainstream media. Moreover any tax increase now only damages the economy. Concerning deductions, why give stuff away now for no real tax reform or simplification?
Here’s what the GOP should do now:
I. The House passes a bill extending for a year or at least six months all the cliff items – current income tax rates; the Alternative Minimum Tax patch; yes, even those Social Security payroll tax cuts. The whole kit and caboodle. The same with sequestration.
The point to make is that the U.S. economy is headed for a recession. One ill omen is that business investment is faltering. Any tax boost will be particularly perverse. Destroying capital and hurting small businesses will only contract the economy even more. We shouldn’t follow the bad examples of Western Europe and Japan. These countries are all raising taxes and the results are frightening. Japan’s economy is declining. Southern Europe is in a severe recession. France and Germany are about to go into recession. Britain just reported disappointing economic news and experts believe its economy will go into negative territory.
Another point to make – it is ridiculous to try to reform the tax code two weeks before Christmas. Ditto for entitlements.
About “the rich” label, polls show that if the question is rephrased as to whether the economy would be helped if upper-income couples had their tax bills increased substantially, most Americans are opposed to the hikes. We should learn how to phrase these issues instead of employing the Democrat’s vocabulary.
II. Turn the tables on the White House debt ceiling proposal by passing a bill mandating that Social Security trust fund assets – now held in useless, non-negotiable IOUs from the Treasury – be converted to marketable Treasury bonds which should have been done decades ago. That way if there is a debt ceiling impasse early next year Social Security and Medicare payments won’t be jeopardized. The trust funds could just sell on the open market bonds to raise the cash to make payments. Those trust funds are supposed to have more than $2 trillion in reserves. Instead, they are loaded with phony, illiquid assets.
CONTINUED: http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2012/12/06/message-to-gop-no-tax-increases-go-on-offense/
Showing posts with label tax code. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tax code. Show all posts
Friday, December 7, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
I’m Not Sure What Republicans Stand For in Congress | RedState
I’m Not Sure What Republicans Stand For in Congress | RedState
I was once an elected Republican. There isn’t much that the Republican Party has to do with trash collection, but I was a Republican on the Macon, Georgia City Council and I supported trash collection privatization. It wasn’t the Republican thing to do. It was the conservative thing to do. It was the right thing to do. Multiple times it had been tried and multiple times it had saved taxpayer dollars.
I was once an elected Republican. There isn’t much that the Republican Party has to do with trash collection, but I was a Republican on the Macon, Georgia City Council and I supported trash collection privatization. It wasn’t the Republican thing to do. It was the conservative thing to do. It was the right thing to do. Multiple times it had been tried and multiple times it had saved taxpayer dollars.
There aren’t a lot of Republican positions at the local level. There aren’t a lot of Democrat positions at the local level. There are conservative and liberal positions. There are positions that believe the private sector can do better and positions that believe the public sector can do better.
In Congress, there used to be clear and distinct Republican and Democrat positions. But in the past decade, about the only thing separating the GOP from the Democrats is the rate of spending. Republicans spend less, but they still spend a lot. Oh, and they love babies in utero.
Republicans used to believe in free enterprise, the private sector, and low taxes. They believed in getting government the heck out of the way. They still talk like that, but they don’t seem to actually be operating like that. Senate and House Republicans seem to be in a bidding war to increase revenue in Washington. What’s worse, they are mendacious enough to call it “increasing revenue” instead of “tax increases,” when it amounts to the same thing. The Republican Party of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have taken a party that once believed in starving the beast and transforming it into a party that believes in feeding the leviathan lest the leviathan consume them. They operate out of fear — fear of losing their remaining power, fear of blame, and fear of the unknown.
I am absolutely in favor of simplifying the tax code. I am absolutely in favor of getting rid of loopholes. But I am absolutely opposed to engaging in machinations of the tax code designed to increase spending through closed loopholes and the like. Increased revenue should come through simplifying Washington to spur economic growth. Get Washington out of our lives.
While the Republican Party in Washington says that, it sure seems not to be living up to that. Consider this so called fiscal cliff.
The fiscal cliff is actually a bipartisan compromise that congress critters and their friends in the press have now given a spooky name to scare the American people lest Washington have to take the medicine it prescribed itself. The Republicans were complicit in this arrangement.
Republicans and Democrats punted and punted on the Bush tax cuts and they arranged a debt ceiling increase that would, should a committee designed to fail actually fail, force draconian cuts that both sides could scream about and demand be rejected. So Washington would get a debt ceiling increase, but would not actually have to suffer the pain of cuts. Republicans and Democrats collaborated to design a medicine so vile they could ask the public’s forgiveness if they chose not to take it and design a more sugary medicine instead.
But one way or the other, the medicine must now be taken.
Friday, April 29, 2011
TAXPAYERS FOR COMMON SENSE:
Taxes a la mode
Apr 29, 2011
Adding insult to injury, taxpayers recently found out that BP was able to save $13 billion on their taxes by writing off their losses associated with last summer’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Talk about a silver – golden – lining.
So not only were we left with an environmental disaster in the gulf, diminished economies in the neighboring states, and the use of federal resources, but the federal budget sank deeper into the red because BP could write off its losses.
This isn’t to say that BP wanted the spill to happen. Who can forget their then-CEO Tony Hayward famously telling us “There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.” But it’s hard to believe this was what tax writers had in mind when they decided to allow companies to deduct losses from their tax payments.
So it goes with the tax code. As it increases in complexity with more loopholes, carve outs, and sweeteners added to encourage this or that activity, the law of unintended consequences – and cost – continues to grow.
This isn’t just dodges and abusive tax shelters. The tax code is riddled with provisions picking winners and losers. Provisions that favor one industry or investment over another without any oversight or accounting of the costs, or even whether these preferential tax policies are achieving what politicians claimed they would.
For example, the home mortgage interest deduction has increased the cost of homes and contributed to the housing bubble while countries without similar tax policies -- Canada, England -- have roughly the same or higher rates of home ownership. Or, the deduction for employer provided health care plans which has subsidized so-called Cadillac health care plans, helped render invisible to the insured the true cost of health insurance, and hindered shifts in the workforce because people are tied to their jobs because of health insurance.
Since the last fundamental reform in 1986, tax entropy has occurred, making the code more complex and less ordered. Like a forest never allowed to burn, the underbrush and debris piles up, choking out life and making it impossible to navigate. What we need is a controlled burn in the tax code.
We can start right now with the long list of energy tax breaks. This week the oil and gas companies are releasing their first quarter results and unlike those of us feeling pain at the pump, these corporations are pumping up their bottom lines. ExxonMobil announced that it made more than $10.7 billion in profits, roughly $5 million an hour for the last three months. The industries’ tax breaks are deeply imbedded in the code – some are nearly 100 years old. But they are all over the place – a deduction for exploration, another for depletion of their assets, another for royalties they pay to foreign governments. The list goes on, and some in Congress are trying to add to that list. Talk about wrong-headed.
We should rip all of the energy tax breaks out by their roots. Uncle Sam and well-heeled lobbyists shouldn’t be picking winners and losers in the code whether they be wind and solar or oil and gas. And let’s be clear – the big winner, not surprisingly, is oil and gas, which spent more than $30 million in campaign contributions during the last election and $150 million on lobbying in 2010. A pretty sound investment for their billions in tax breaks.
Last year’s fiscal commission called for tackling tax expenditures, the President went after them in his budget, so did House Budget Chairman Ryan in his budget, and just the other day he said “subsidies for all energy companies need to be reduced or eliminated so that we can get government out of the business of picking winners and losers in the market.” Here, here. Time for Congress to quit yappin’ and get cuttin’.
http://taxpayer.net/sarticle.php?proj_id=4477&t=Taxes%20a%20la%20mode
Apr 29, 2011
Adding insult to injury, taxpayers recently found out that BP was able to save $13 billion on their taxes by writing off their losses associated with last summer’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Talk about a silver – golden – lining.
So not only were we left with an environmental disaster in the gulf, diminished economies in the neighboring states, and the use of federal resources, but the federal budget sank deeper into the red because BP could write off its losses.
This isn’t to say that BP wanted the spill to happen. Who can forget their then-CEO Tony Hayward famously telling us “There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.” But it’s hard to believe this was what tax writers had in mind when they decided to allow companies to deduct losses from their tax payments.
So it goes with the tax code. As it increases in complexity with more loopholes, carve outs, and sweeteners added to encourage this or that activity, the law of unintended consequences – and cost – continues to grow.
This isn’t just dodges and abusive tax shelters. The tax code is riddled with provisions picking winners and losers. Provisions that favor one industry or investment over another without any oversight or accounting of the costs, or even whether these preferential tax policies are achieving what politicians claimed they would.
For example, the home mortgage interest deduction has increased the cost of homes and contributed to the housing bubble while countries without similar tax policies -- Canada, England -- have roughly the same or higher rates of home ownership. Or, the deduction for employer provided health care plans which has subsidized so-called Cadillac health care plans, helped render invisible to the insured the true cost of health insurance, and hindered shifts in the workforce because people are tied to their jobs because of health insurance.
Since the last fundamental reform in 1986, tax entropy has occurred, making the code more complex and less ordered. Like a forest never allowed to burn, the underbrush and debris piles up, choking out life and making it impossible to navigate. What we need is a controlled burn in the tax code.
We can start right now with the long list of energy tax breaks. This week the oil and gas companies are releasing their first quarter results and unlike those of us feeling pain at the pump, these corporations are pumping up their bottom lines. ExxonMobil announced that it made more than $10.7 billion in profits, roughly $5 million an hour for the last three months. The industries’ tax breaks are deeply imbedded in the code – some are nearly 100 years old. But they are all over the place – a deduction for exploration, another for depletion of their assets, another for royalties they pay to foreign governments. The list goes on, and some in Congress are trying to add to that list. Talk about wrong-headed.
We should rip all of the energy tax breaks out by their roots. Uncle Sam and well-heeled lobbyists shouldn’t be picking winners and losers in the code whether they be wind and solar or oil and gas. And let’s be clear – the big winner, not surprisingly, is oil and gas, which spent more than $30 million in campaign contributions during the last election and $150 million on lobbying in 2010. A pretty sound investment for their billions in tax breaks.
Last year’s fiscal commission called for tackling tax expenditures, the President went after them in his budget, so did House Budget Chairman Ryan in his budget, and just the other day he said “subsidies for all energy companies need to be reduced or eliminated so that we can get government out of the business of picking winners and losers in the market.” Here, here. Time for Congress to quit yappin’ and get cuttin’.
http://taxpayer.net/sarticle.php?proj_id=4477&t=Taxes%20a%20la%20mode
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
20 Tax Facts That Will Blow Your Mind
In honor of tax day, Business Insider put together a slide show on the 20 tax facts that will “make your head explode.” Here’s a sample:
1. The IRS has more employees than there are people in Flint, Michigan (106K vs 102K).
2. Americans spend $28 billion and 8 billion hours each year doing their taxes.
3. The number of pages in the tax code has increased 16,775% in the past century.
4. You could fill Dallas with the number of accountants Americans hire to help with taxes each year (over a million).
You can read the rest here. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/20-tax-facts-that-will-blow-your-mind/
1. The IRS has more employees than there are people in Flint, Michigan (106K vs 102K).
2. Americans spend $28 billion and 8 billion hours each year doing their taxes.
3. The number of pages in the tax code has increased 16,775% in the past century.
4. You could fill Dallas with the number of accountants Americans hire to help with taxes each year (over a million).
You can read the rest here. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/20-tax-facts-that-will-blow-your-mind/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
