The dingbat who wrote this trainwreck of a story just got married and says she's looking forward to the big tax break from married filing jointly and being a dependent on her husband's health care plan lol

 Farewell -- and good riddance -- to 'typical American family'...

 When my partner and I file our annual income taxes in the coming weeks, we'll enjoy a sizable tax break thanks to our decision to tie the knot last fall. And as a dependent on his employer-provided health-insurance plan, I'm able to make a living as a freelancer without worrying about healthcare coverage.

Libertarian John Fund Bails Out Of The Tax Code's Marriage Bonus

Libertarians do not see the value to the country of providing tax incentives to couples who marry and make sacrifices to raise the next generation, usually in the form of one parent staying home and keeping deeply involved in the lives of their children while the other works for a paycheck. Libertarians have become used to the idea that America is OK with an increasingly maladjusted and malcontented population of fruits, nuts and flakes, perhaps because that's who they are.

Only Phyllis Schlafly, it seems, is old enough and conservative enough to remind people today how hard it was and how long it took to achieve "married filing jointly" in 1948, but when she is gone none will be left to carry the torch. Instead we will be left with the fiddlers like Gov. Rick Perry and the kooks like John Fund who will preside over the crack-up of America.

Here is John Fund, for National Review, just another reason I stopped subscribing long ago:

"The cherished principle of separating church and state should be extended as much as possible into separating marriage and state. ... But instead of fighting over which marriages gain its approval, government would end the business of making distinctions for the purpose of social engineering based on whether someone was married. A flatter tax code would go a long way toward ending marriage penalties or bonuses. We would need a more sensible system of legal immigration so that fewer people would enter the country solely on the basis of spousal rights."

You see, it doesn't just stop with the one thing. Everything conservative must go: America's Protestant inheritance, the primacy of the nuclear family and national identity rooted in law and order. Libertarians, like other ideologues, aren't called the terrible simplifiers for nothing.

Libertarian Sen. Rand Paul Would Throw Everyone "Married Filing Jointly" Under The Bus

Pro-family forces fought long and hard to secure tax preferences for couples trying to raise children for the future in the aftermath of World War II, and libertarian Sen. Rand Paul would give it all away to appease the gay mafia. This is what passes for conservative Republicanism these days.

If you don't know by now that libertarianism is a threat to traditional Americans, you haven't been paying attention.

Story here.

Romney Is Half Right: One Tax Proposal Is New, And Alarming

And it is amazing no one has taken this seriously:

"My plan is not like anything that's been tried before. My plan is to bring down rates, but also bring down deductions and exemptions and credits at the same time so the revenue stays in, but that we bring down rates to get more people working."

Romney is threatening to reduce the value of exemptions and credits which exist under the existing tax code.

This amounts to major fiddling which the preoccupation with "deductions" obscures.

Deductions we have lost before, as in the 1986 tax reform. That he wants to reduce the value of more deductions is bad enough. But the truly alarming thing is the proposal to do the same to exemptions, and to a lesser extent to credits. That is new, and alarming.

That can only mean the whole set of assumptions involving the system of personal exemptions, and perhaps also the time-honored "married filing jointly" status itself, and credits such as the Earned Income Credit and the Child Tax Credit and the like. I can well imagine a President Mitt Romney eliminating the favoritism of the tax code toward married people, and toward their housing and their children, to make gay and unmarried people equal to them in the tax code. Remember, in Massachusetts Gov. Romney had a reputation, deserved, for being a tax equalizer.

I also expect he will propose capping the value of deductions and credits by using something like Martin Feldstein's plan, in order to preserve the deductions and credits for lower income individuals but phasing them out as one climbs the income ladder. In other words, the progressive tax code stays, but progressivity of tax deductibility goes out the window. That may be fair to a liberal like Romney, but it isn't maintaining progressivity, it is steepening it.

Mitt Romney is not a social conservative. And if he gets his way with the tax code, I suspect he's going to prove it, unless conservatives in the US House stop him.

Good luck, America. You're going to need it.

Video Of Romney Backtracking On Tax Cuts, Threatening Your Deductions

Romney will take away your deductions and exemptions

Romney the tax simplifier, tax leveler, tax back-tracker, tax flip-flopper, uncertain tax trumpeter was on display in Ohio this week, posing himself as a clear and present danger to the tax code's many indispensable props to middle class family life, including not just the mortgage interest deduction but also for the first time "exemptions".

The last time a Republican talked this way was in 1986 when Ronald Reagan took away deductibility of credit card interest in exchange for lower overall rates.

Those rates lasted until Clinton, when they were raised. But deductibility of credit card interest? That never came back, and never will.

The same thing is going to happen to the home mortgage interest deduction, and possibly to "married filing jointly" and other such provisions of the current tax code. You'll get lower rates . . . for a while, until they have to raise them.

And then the protections of the current provisions will be absent, exposing you to the full force of increased tax rates.

The fat cats from The Wall Street Journal and Forbes Magazine to Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney, the Libertarians and the Simpson-Bowles crowd all want their greedy little hands on more revenue from the middle class . . . so they don't have to pay as much. It's just that simple.

And they are betting you are so stupid that you will vote for that!

There is nothing wrong with the current code which spending cuts cannot fix.

Story and video here.

Romney's Alarming Flip On Taxes: Expect Cuts To Deductions And Exemptions

The Wall Street Journal, here, is describing this flip as a shift.

I'll say, like a mountain shifting, or a Giant Foo Bird shifting its entrails over your house:

Mitt Romney on Wednesday told an Ohio crowd that while he would work to lower tax rates on businesses and individuals, they shouldn’t “be expecting a huge cut in taxes because I’m also going to lower deductions and exemptions.”

The deductions we all fear losing are relatively common knowledge, like the home mortgage interest deduction. Romney has been cagey about this, on again off again about reducing the benefit for higher earners only. But this outburst sounds like cutting the deduction for those farther down the income ladder is possible. 

Cuts to "exemptions" is an entirely new animal, however, and goes to the very heart of the tax code. Since Americans fought hard after WWII for the tax-filing category "Married Filing Jointly", the prop to families trying to raise children on one income has come under repeated attack, first under Nixon, and then from feminists who deplored the special tax status given to families. Gay and lesbian couples tirelessly work for recognition of their unions as marriages mostly because they want in on the tax preference.

It is extremely disappointing to hear Romney talk this way. It plays entirely into the hands of the opposition, who can use it to sow doubt in the minds of his would be supporters about whether Republicans will raise taxes on the middle class. I , for one, think Romney will say anything he thinks he has to in order to win votes, even if it is self-contradictory. But the fact of the matter is Romney was a tax equalizer in Massachusetts, which meant privileges for favored groups went out the window, and so fees went up on businesses and taxes went up on properties to adjust to his leveling programs. 

With Rush Limbaugh candidly letting it slip today that the middle class has been pandered to through the tax code, the drumbeat against the people grows in intensity.

And the dupes will vote for it.

Sean Hannity's Libertarianism Is Stupid

The radio ad for Sean Hannity's program runs incessantly, featuring him saying, "Society doesn't need to put its seal of approval on the choices people make."

This in reference to same sex marriage.

He obviously doesn't appreciate how the government already puts its seal of approval on people's choices, and has done so for a very long time.

The most obvious social example is marriage itself, which receives a healthy tax preference in the form of the tax code's filing status "married filing jointly" . . . since the end of the Second World War! This isn't just a seal of approval. It's actually a financial encouragement to marry.

Or consider the child tax credit, which you aren't going to get without having children. With it, the government encourages the having of children.

Or the earned income credit, which you don't get unless you have some earned income. It's government's way of encouraging people who don't work at all to get a job and get work experience, on the assumption that they will move up the ladder eventually to positions which pay too much to receive the credit.

All of these things the government encourages to promote social stability in the form of nuclear families, home ownership, work, and population growth, all of which are essential to . . . tax revenue.

Giving same sex partners the same rewards as heterosexual unions ignores the fact that the former are naturally incapable of growing the population. Government has no interest in promoting the ineffectual.

"Be it then, as Sir Robert says, that anciently it was usual for men to sell and castrate their children, Observations, 155. Let it be, that they exposed them; add to it, if you please, for this is still greater power, that they begat them for their tables, to fat and eat them: if this proves a right to do so, we may, by the same argument, justify adultery, incest and sodomy, for there are examples of these too, both ancient and modern; sins, which I suppose have their principal aggravation from this, that they cross the main intention of nature, which willeth the increase of mankind, and the continuation of the species in the highest perfection, and the distinction of families, with the security of the marriage bed, as necessary thereunto."

-- John Locke

The Economic and Social Value of the Joint Income Tax Return Produced the Baby Boom

So says Phyliss Schlafly, who thinks Texas Gov. Rick Perry's flat tax plan flattens the traditional family and rewards kinky couples, here:

The joint income tax return for husbands and wives was landmark legislation. The Republican Congress passed it in 1948 over President Truman's veto.

As originally designed, the joint return recognized a husband and wife as two equal partners, even if the husband earned all the family's income. Each tax bracket, deduction and exemption was equal to twice that of a single person.

Subsequent tax reform bills, especially the one signed by Richard Nixon in 1969, which also introduced the hated Alternative Minimum Tax, reduced the value of a joint return to only about 1.6 persons, while increasing the tax benefit of an unmarried "head of household" to about 1.4 persons. Simple arithmetic shows that a single parent with an unmarried live-in "partner" gets more favorable tax treatment than respectable married couples struggling to support their own children.

And by the way, the postwar "baby boom" happened during the 20-year period when married couples were fairly valued in the federal income tax. That's not coincidence; incentives matter, and America's marriage rate and birth rate plummeted after the value of the joint return was reduced.