Rustic
Diamond Member
- Oct 3, 2015
- 58,769
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- #61
First of all the government should not be borrowing anything, borrowing put you as the slave of the lender.Real tax reform would have another benefit. The people who lend money to the government would suddenly have much more faith in our ability to honor our debts, and interest rates would drop, making the interest on our debt easier to manage.
It's win/win.
Whoa, you can stop right there because that is the key.
First, congratulations--pretty rare to see someone talk about "tax expenditures". Even more rare do you find someone that actually understands them. But here is the deal, the people lending money to the government, they are the very same people reaping the benefits of those tax expenditures. Take the big three--payment of medical benefits with pre-tax dollars, the home mortgage interest deduction, and the "step-up", especially the "step-up", listed by the Department of Treasury as "capital gains"--those three alone account for three hundred fifty billion of your 1.7 trillion dollar figure. Rather conservative if you ask me. Steinbrenner's family opted for an estate tax and the step-up. That alone cost the government three hundred million.
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/Tax-Expenditures-FY2016.pdf
The government is required to list tax expenditures within each budget. The above is that required report.
When Reagan took office the wealthy figured out pretty damn quick that it was much better to lend money to the government than pay taxes. Hell, anyone would rather collect interest, and especially when it is considered "risk-free", than PAY taxes. And the most effective way to cut taxes paid by the wealthy is not with some big swooping "rate cut", but with "tax expenditures". Stealthy, confusing, limited, and complicated--damn perfect for those that can afford the "access", rather it be the funds to pay lawyers, accountants, or people like me, or the funds to donate to politicians in order to create some more "tax expenditures".