You heard me right, the liberal chorus attacking the progressive tax code, in this case the progressive tax code's deductibility provisions which are . . . well, progressive.
Barone and other liberal Republicans like Pat Toomey, Gang of Sixers and Gang of Twelvers do it on the grounds that the deductions for mortgage interest and state and local taxes help the $100K+ set more.
Barone and other liberal Republicans like Pat Toomey, Gang of Sixers and Gang of Twelvers do it on the grounds that the deductions for mortgage interest and state and local taxes help the $100K+ set more.
Nevermind "the rich" already pay the vast majority of the taxes. They want to make them pay even more because . . . well, they don't really need the money, and government does! And maybe liberals will like us more.
Talk about ceding the moral high ground to the left. Who would want to go to all the trouble of becoming rich just so that they can have the privilege of paying even more of the taxes?
Nevermind that the poor own one of the biggest "tax loss expenditures" in the form of transfer payments for the Earned Income Credit and the Child Tax Credit: $109 billion. Compare that to the mortgage interest deduction's tax loss cost to the Treasury : $88 billion.
Here is Barone:
[T]he big money you can get from eliminating tax preferences comes from three provisions that are widely popular.
The three are the charitable deduction, the home mortgage interest deduction, and the state and local tax deduction. ...
[T]he vast bulk of the "tax expenditures" -- the money the government doesn't receive because taxpayers deduct mortgage interest payments from total income -- goes to high earners . . ..
Well why shouldn't they under a progressive tax system?
There's really no difference between Michael Barone and Republican advocates for "tax reform" and Democrats like Peter Orszag, for example, who makes an argument for similarly flattening deductibility for the rich by limiting their traditional deductions enjoyed by everyone across the income spectrum. What this amounts to is an admission that the progressive deductibility which we have now does NOT go hand in hand with the tax code's progressive taxation.
The current arrangement may not seem fair to flat taxers, but it is internally consistent. If you pay progressively more in taxes, your deductions should justly be progressively worth more to you. And so they are. If you pay progressively less in taxes, your deductions should justly be worth less to you, progressively. And so they are.
Proposals to limit deductions for one class of taxpayers amount to destroying the internal coherence of the progressive tax code itself. It is nothing less than an attack on the idea of progressivity and its fair unfairness, all in the name of extracting even more from the pockets of successful people.
Sheer nincompoopery.
[T]he big money you can get from eliminating tax preferences comes from three provisions that are widely popular.
The three are the charitable deduction, the home mortgage interest deduction, and the state and local tax deduction. ...
[T]he vast bulk of the "tax expenditures" -- the money the government doesn't receive because taxpayers deduct mortgage interest payments from total income -- goes to high earners . . ..
Well why shouldn't they under a progressive tax system?
There's really no difference between Michael Barone and Republican advocates for "tax reform" and Democrats like Peter Orszag, for example, who makes an argument for similarly flattening deductibility for the rich by limiting their traditional deductions enjoyed by everyone across the income spectrum. What this amounts to is an admission that the progressive deductibility which we have now does NOT go hand in hand with the tax code's progressive taxation.
The current arrangement may not seem fair to flat taxers, but it is internally consistent. If you pay progressively more in taxes, your deductions should justly be progressively worth more to you. And so they are. If you pay progressively less in taxes, your deductions should justly be worth less to you, progressively. And so they are.
Proposals to limit deductions for one class of taxpayers amount to destroying the internal coherence of the progressive tax code itself. It is nothing less than an attack on the idea of progressivity and its fair unfairness, all in the name of extracting even more from the pockets of successful people.
Sheer nincompoopery.
