Your bitter tone here in the face of humor is sort of telling. Here we have a revenue neutral shift, and you're treating it as a move backwards, giving heft and weight to my theory that youse guyz really care not for the recipients of the tax largesse, or for the uses to which the bucks go, but are actually more concerned that you get to take the bucks from the people who have more than you, and that those people not get to keep what they have. It's not so much "these poor people have these needs!" to you as it is "damn you rich guyz anyway, you can't HAVE all of that!"

Strangely enough, though, if you do the math, this is making the adjustment MORE dependent upon income levels, not less, so you should have been doubley happy.

And, finally, who was calling for a draft most recently? T'wasn't the neo's, was it? And it wasn't driven so much by a love for a greater military as it was by a desire to target Others. So, Crimea River.

Probably neutral for me. The AMT is a problem, but only about equal to what losing the mortgage deduction will be. I mostly like it because it's one small step in bringing us back to a rational taxation system. The AMT is a total kludge, and the mortgage interest deduction, while it was useful in building the original ownership society years ago, has outlived its usefulness, and is mostly a boon to owners of very expensive or very leveraged housing.

ETA - I'm mostly just opposed to all of the long-lasting efforts at social engineering that have been built into the tax code. While the efforts might have been noble at heart, we're just not very good at it, and we end up doing things to society that we didn't intend, and that are harmful to economic and social growth.

I'm sorry. I thought your embrace of the correlation of having Democrats pay more at the end of the day was a defense of it on the merits, instead of the kind of humor that tells your rivals to go fuck themselves because "you want to pay more taxes anyway." My bad.

I treat it as nothing of the kind. I do, however, take offense to the targeting of citizens who advocate the necessity of relatively more resources in government by saying "you think it's needed? OK, you pay for it, not us. We'll join in whatever benefits it may bring, though. Thanks for that. "

Hunh. I thought that your punchline depended upon the shift in tax burdens moving in an aggregate sense to those states who really want to tax us all into oblivion. If, instead, your math lesson rings true, this erodes the power of your humor. Pity.

Ah, and here my humor has fallen flat. See, I thought the theme of "those who bring the call, carry the burden" would resonate here as much with adventurous military exercises as it does with the vagaries of taxation burdens as a punishment for frivolous social policy. Ah, well. So, Buildmea Democracy. Everywhere.

My understanding of the code (and I did read up on this in the past year) is that -- even after refinancing -- you are supposed to segregate out that portion of your home mortage which was not used to buy and/or improve your home, and not claim that portion of your interest as deductible -- event hough it shows up on your little interest form.

The calculation gets interesting after a loan consolidation, an addition on the house, and a couple of refis to lower the rate.

S_A_M

P.S. Stop screwing around with us poor blue state folks about the loss of the home interest deduction, etc. It is only a proposal as yet, and I expect it will get rammed back up the appropriate rear ends.

But I have been hit with the AMT three years running, which bites.

Fitzgerald Poll
 

So, as things develop, can we get a poll on who if anyone will be indicted (for anything, not just the secret identity charge)?

1) Nobody
2) Libby only
3) Rove only
4) Libby and Rove
5) Someone else (the field)
6) Someone else and Libby and/or Rove

I'll take 6.

While I happen to generally agree that the AMT is a kludge and I'm not particularly married to the mortgage interest deduction, isn't it inevitable that the code will be an exercise in "social engineering" and just a question of choosing your poison?

After all, before the income tax, we relied on some mix of tariffs, land sales, and excise taxes to finance the government, and all were hard-fought over and the subject of much debate on their social impact. The conservatives wanted to sell land dearly to preserve a cheap labor pool in the East, the radicals and democrats wanted to sell Western land cheaply to encourage upward mobility. The conservatives wanted high tariffs to protect industry, the democrats wanted lower tariffs so that good would be cheaper. I don't know how one raises enough money to support any government without having an impact on society.

Sure, but one can minimize the degree of social engineering by to the maximum extent possible eliminating specific exceptions and different treatment of income and expenses.

Reagan was reasonably successful at reducing the social engineering. But all the junk crept back in.

Wasn't the choice of eliminating the various exemptions itself social engineering, since it shifted much of the tax burden down the economic scale? Which was, of course, the point and goal of supply-side economics.

Two separate choices. Eliminating the exemptions means a different direction, but it also means that there are fewer focused incentives that distort baseline economic activity.

Separately, eliminating those exemptions may have altered the tax burden to lower income people (although usually it works the other way around). There's no reason, however, that it had to be that way. One could always alter the brackets as necessry.

One of the things I have problems with is the idea of "baseline economic activity". Since neither the government nor the economic activity exist in a vacuum, the only baseline that exists is itself the result of a series of policy decisions, and cannot be divorced from them. If we have developed a bloated housing market fed by government tax breaks, and now decide to take the housing market off the tax breaks cold-turkey, we are making a decision to dramatically undercut the value of real estate around the country. Moving to "neutrality" is itself a policy decision with broad impact.

I have nothing against a shift away from some of the focused incentives, though I might lobby or get upset if we shifted from others (such as the charitable tax deduction), but am not certain I see a problem that is big enough to deal with the inevitable dislocation that would result from such a radical shift. It should, at least, be phased in over time.

Fitzgerald Poll
 

Here's a helpful list of those who may be involved in the administration: http://www.thinkprogress.org/leak-scandal

Fitzgerald Poll
 

No one. The Big Zip. Nada.

The same logic labels attempts to return Constitutional law to a bare reading of the language of the Constitution as "judicial activism." I think you parse too deeply when you describe a removal of social engineering-driven tax treatments as social engineering themselves. Returning things to an earlier status will have an effect, but if it brings us back to a less engineering-driven environment, I think using that label is illogical.

I don't believe there is ever a state of purity. Are you suggesting adopting the 1913 tax code simply because it was the first? Or do you prefer the 1861 or 1892 versions? If we adopt those codes, sould we also reinstate the excise taxes from which government derived most of its revenues at the time?

Under the 1913 Code, approximately 1% of the population paid income taxes. Let's just use that code, and raise the rate sufficiently to create the income we need.

With respect to reading the plain language in the constitution, all I want to know is what it means to say that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." That says that absolutely no law can be made by Congress, period, limiting what I say?

Two These Things Are Not Like The Others
 

I don't see insurers leaving certain markets entirely at all. They just stop offering good coverage and begin offering substandard coverage through their lesser quality-line offering subsidiaries. Or they form new coverage programs with each other and reinsurers. They don't walk away from easy money; they just make it more lucrative, by offering less under other brand names. This gives them the ability to say "We had to leave because of the lawsuit crisis" while at the same time making even more money in the market they profess to have left.

There are no guaranteed losers. They drop a doc knowing full well there's a 70% chance they can pick him at the same premium offering less thru a related entity.

Its all the same players in the industry. There aren't any "brand new" insurers coming on scene. They're just playing one massive shell game.