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The plan should be to start raising the next error while the last one is still fresh, build a chain of fuck-ups as long as the chains of Marley's ghost. We got more than enough errors to work with.
Good thing no one listens to me, eh?
Quote of note:
One key issue in the fairness debate is whether recent tax-law changes have biased the tax system against those whose income is derived largely from wages and salaries and toward those who get large dividend and capital-gains payments.
Bush ideas "like lifetime savings accounts and lower taxes on dividends and capital gains - all of that is taking the tax burden off of capital," notes Charles Davenport of Tax Notes.
Allan Sloan, a Newsweek columnist, argued this theory provocatively last week, saying Bush would make it harder for people starting up the economic ladder while showering rewards on the rich.
Tough tax questions face the next president
A growing unintended burden on middle-income people, and a dearth of corporate receipts raise issues of fairness.
By David T. Cook | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
…• Inadequate revenue. "Whoever is president will continue to face huge budget deficits. "They cannot solve those by capping spending," says Charles Davenport, senior contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan publisher. The war in Iraq adds to the problem. On NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday, Senator John McCain of Arizona said, "we are going have to ask for more money after the election, and it's going to increase the ... deficit."
• An explosion in the number of middle-income taxpayers paying the Alternative Minimum Tax. The tax was adopted in the late 1960s to make sure the wealthiest Americans paid at least some taxes. "It now affects substantial numbers of middle-income taxpayers and will, absent a change of law, affect more than 30 million taxpayers by 2010," writes IRS taxpayer advocate Nina Olson in her annual report to Congress. The cost of fixing the problem: upwards of $450 billion over the next 10 years, according to figures from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
• A sizable gap between what the government is owed and what it collects. "The tax gap is more than $300 billion in revenue we think we should be collecting and are not," says Peter Orszag of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "Some of that is nonreporting [of income], some of it is aggressive use of tax sheltering."
• A major erosion in corporate tax revenue. Congress's General Accounting Office recently reported that 61 percent of US-owned companies and 71 percent of foreign-owned firms paid no taxes in the US from 1996 to 2000, when profits were booming. Last year, corporate taxes fell to just 7.4 percent of government receipts, versus 20.3 percent 40 years ago.
