Tax Code

CONGRESS HAS been making noises about rewriting the federal tax code. Republicans sent President Clinton a letter last month asking him to develop sweeping changes by May 1. It's unlikely they will get what they say they want. For one thing, it is difficult to take seriously the Republicans' call for "no loopholes or special treatment for favored interests." True tax reform would have both parties screaming over gored oxen.More palatable politically would be yet another so-called Taxpayers Bill of Rights to make the Internal Revenue Service operate more efficiently and fairly.

WASHINGTON -- In a time-tested show of political theater, Republican leaders will dump the entire U.S. tax code into Boston Harbor today, as though confident that tax reform will soon make the loathsome load a thing of the past.But unlike the crates of tea jettisoned by Colonial patriots, the tax books will be attached to a strong tether. And once the cameras switch off and the crowds dissipate, workmen will haul all 101,295 pages back from the deep, proving symbolically what Washington knows full well: Neither the politicians nor the public are ready to bury the tax system just yet."

PRESIDENT Clinton's proposal to provide financial relief for families who give long-term care to the elderly and disabled is a good idea. But it's also another example of the increasing use of piecemeal tax benefits to court the middle class.The plan calls for income tax credits (subtracted from the tax due) of up to $1,000 a year for those providing long-term care to the sick and disabled, primarily for persons who care for relatives in their home. More than 2 million Americans would be affected.

WASHINGTON - President Bush is jetting to the Midwest today while Republican interest groups in Washington are raking in advertising money. It may seem like it's still election season. In fact, Bush and his allies are waging a new campaign to amass support for a second-term agenda that includes revamping Social Security, rewriting medical malpractice and immigration laws, and overhauling the nation's tax code. If history is a guide, the president's toughest opponent is time. He probably has a narrow window in which to capitalize on post-election momentum and push ideas through Congress before he is regarded as a lame duck.

WASHINGTON -- In an election-year move Republican leaders had hoped would send a powerful political message, the House voted yesterday to abolish the much-hated federal income tax code -- but by a margin so thin the bill's future is bleak.Responding to a grass-roots campaign by small businesses, House GOP leaders turned a bumper-sticker crusade launched last fall into a piece of legislation that would wipe off the books by 2003 a 5.5 million-word tax code widely acknowledged to be painfully complex.

Gov. Martin O'Malleyand Maryland Democrats developed a creative yet questionable fix for their budget woes in a special session of the General Assembly last month. Governor O'Malley performed budgetary acrobatics by leveraging Maryland's geography and the federal tax code's idiosyncrasies. Thanks to Congress, big spenders in Annapolis are now dining at federal taxpayers' expense. When Governor O'Malley first came into office in 2007, he needed a way to pay for all of his campaign promises, so Annapolis used a "millionaire's surtax" to raise the money.

WASHINGTON - The House voted yesterday to end the tax code's "marriage penalty" permanently in the first of a series of GOP efforts to highlight popular elements of President Bush's tax cuts before the November election. As part of Bush's 2001 tax cut, the House voted to end a quirk in the law that forced many married couples to pay more in taxes if they filed jointly than if they filed as individuals. But the tax relief was temporary, with the benefit decreasing next year and expiring at the end of the decade.

WASHINGTON — Fifteen years ago, Carol Nietmann and her husband bought a spacious house in Calvert County near the Chesapeake Bay. And thanks to the time-honored tax deduction for mortgage interest, she says, their new place was a little bigger and a little nicer than they otherwise would have been able to afford. Perhaps the most sacred of all the sacred cows in the tax code, the home mortgage deduction has long been seen as critical to a major element in the American dream — owning your own home.

Typical daily schedule for a member of the United States Congress: •8:30 a.m. - National Wind Energy Association: to discuss wind production tax credit. •10 a.m. - National Association of Manufacturers: to discuss accelerated depreciation schedules and corporate income tax. •11 a.m. - National Association of Realtors: to discuss home mortgage deduction and capital gains exclusion on home sales. •1 p.m. - The Alliance for Charitable Reform, National Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, American Cancer Society, Muscular Dystrophy Association: to discuss enhanced funding for National Institutes of Health and federal charitable deduction.

Loyal readers of this page are likely aware that we have not been great supporters of the tea party movement. Too often, we have found those anti-tax crusaders who call themselves tea party patriots are simply rebranded John Birch Society members of an earlier time with all the extremist anti-civil rights, anti-immigration, and anti-United Nations rhetoric that comes with it. But the latest disclosure - gleaned from a draft inspector general's report...