From President Obama to House Speaker John A. Boehner, there’s broad consensus that Congress
needs to unclutter the federal tax code and remove the special breaks
that litter its 70,000 pages — but Thursday’s dry run in a Senate committee showed just how tough it will be to slash.
The Finance Committee
voted to renew 51 special tax breaks for another year and to raise the
level of a tax designed to hit the wealthy, at a cost of more than $205
billion — all of it tacked onto the deficit.
Sen. Max Baucus, Montana Democrat and chairman of the committee, said that counted as progress — 21 other special tax breaks could have been included but weren’t.
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How many times are we going to have to watch some politician hold up the gazillion pages of tax code and say something has to be done about it?
ReplyDeleteIt's the congress "Sword in the Stone". They can look at it, complain about it, huff and puff about doing something about it, but until somebody grabs the haft and pulls it out, it's all bad theater and tells us, the American people, that they never intend to do anything about it, except use it as an election tool either for or against a given party or candidate.
As a side note: Does anyone know how many people and businesses depend on our behemoth of a tax code for work, and whose jobs might be seriously affected by simplifying the tax process? Accountants, attorneys, individual tax preparers and tax preparation companies, advertisers, printers, IRS employees, etc., and, of course, our legislators. It surely runs to the millions, and the amount they're paid runs to the hundreds of billions, if not more.