Tax Challenges for the Next President (op-ed), by Bill Archer & James Carter:
Our next president will encounter three ticking tax bombs in the weeks following the inauguration, as he or she prepares the budget for fiscal year 2010. Should even one of them detonate, we all will suffer the consequences:
- The first ticking bomb is the fate of the Bush tax cuts. …
- The second tax bomb is the Alternative Minimum Tax. … Defusing these two bombs — that is, extending the Bush tax cuts (and other expiring tax provisions) and indexing the AMT for inflation — would reduce federal tax receipts slightly more than $3.2 trillion from fiscal years 2010 through 2017, on a static revenue estimation basis. In reality, much of that $3.2 trillion would never materialize, due to a weaker economy.
- The third tax time bomb is America’s looming entitlement crisis. As increasing numbers of baby boomers retire, Medicare will slide toward insolvency and federal spending on Medicaid and other health-care programs will skyrocket. … The next president … will inherit a federal budget on the verge of an apparent surplus, but with three ticking tax time bombs that threaten economic carnage and a budget meltdown. Tick. Tick. Tick.
FairTax Flaws (op-ed), by Jerry Bowyer:
Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucus partly on a movement incubated in large part on radio talk shows: the FairTax. If words were deeds, then life would be great. We could simply declare that by switching from a federal income tax to a national retail sales tax, tax cheating would end, code complexity would be a thing of the past, and illegal immigrants would start paying taxes. And, of course, we’d switch into high economic growth — forever.
The problem is that none of this would happen. People would simply switch from cheating on income taxes to cheating on sales taxes. … I’m a recovering tax accountant (and not a good one at that) and I’ve got 50 ways to avoid this tax swimming around in my head. What about the really smart guys?
