Taxes 📍

Congress Takes Aim At Tax Rules That Hit Hardest At Upper Middle Class

|

AMT: Congress Takes Aim At Tax Rules That Hit Hardest At Upper Middle Class

"Scrapping the AMT would lower the potential tax hit for affluent families. But the AMT has survived for decades because it generates a lot of money for government coffers."

"Eliminating the AMT would cost the U.S. government some $700 billion in revenue over the next decade, about half the estimated price tag for the tax bill Congress is now considering."

"It would also potentially remove some of the constraints on the use of tax shelters by the wealthy, allowing taxpayers to take advantage of more loopholes and deductions, Gale notes."

Nancy Pelosi’s claims on middle-income taxpayers and state and local tax deductions

|

Nancy Pelosi’s claims on middle-income taxpayers and state and local tax deductions

"This is a good example of how tax data can be manipulated. Pelosi is usually eager to point out that wealthy Americans will mostly benefit from broad-based tax cuts. In this case, wealthier Americans would mainly feel the effects of a broad-based elimination of a tax break"

"But in this case, Pelosi chooses to ignore the distributional tables and instead focus on the absolute number of people affected, even if the impact is mostly felt by the rich. She earns two Pinocchios."

Filing Taxes Could Be Free and Simple. But H&R Block and Intuit Are Still Lobbying Against It.

|

Filing Taxes Could Be Free and Simple. But H&R Block and Intuit Are Still Lobbying Against It.

"Here’s how preparing your taxes could work: You sit down, review a prefilled filing from the government. If it’s accurate, you sign it. If it’s not, you fix it or ignore it altogether and prepare your return yourself. It’s your choice. You might not have to pay for an accountant, or fiddle for hours with complex software. It could all be over in minutes.

It’s already like that in parts of Europe. And it would not be particularly difficult to give U.S. taxpayers the same option. After all, the government already gets earnings information from employers.

But as ProPublica has detailed again and again, Intuit — the makers of TurboTax — and H&R Block have lobbied for years to derail any move toward such a system. And they continued in 2016."