By Chris Farrell
“There has been increasingly widespread dissatisfaction in the United States with the Federal tax system. Numerous special features of the current law, adopted over the years, have led to extreme complexity and have raised questions about the law’s basic fairness.” Sound familiar? Those are the opening sentences of a 1977 U.S. Treasury study, “Blueprints for Basic Tax Reform.” Sad to say, the income tax code’s complexity and basic unfairness have worsened since then.
The latest reminder is the dust-up over Mitt Romney’s 2010 tax return, which showed him to have an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent on his 2010 income of $21.6 million (and which was accompanied by an estimate of an effective rate of 15.4 percent on 2011 income of $20.9 million). Former Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain got a lot of attention with his proposed 9-9-9 tax overhaul. Tax reform is a key change in the various blue chip proposals for reducing the long-term federal debt and deficit, such as the Dec. 1, 2010, plan from Erskine Bowles, the former Clinton chief of staff, and Alan Simpson, former Republican senator from Wyoming. President Obama joined the fray in his State of the Union address on Jan. 24, when he called for anyone with an annual income of more than $1 million to pay a minimum effective tax rate of 30 percent.
Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/finance/tax-reform-is-coming-with-many-deserving-targets-01302012.html
“There has been increasingly widespread dissatisfaction in the United States with the Federal tax system. Numerous special features of the current law, adopted over the years, have led to extreme complexity and have raised questions about the law’s basic fairness.” Sound familiar? Those are the opening sentences of a 1977 U.S. Treasury study, “Blueprints for Basic Tax Reform.” Sad to say, the income tax code’s complexity and basic unfairness have worsened since then.
The latest reminder is the dust-up over Mitt Romney’s 2010 tax return, which showed him to have an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent on his 2010 income of $21.6 million (and which was accompanied by an estimate of an effective rate of 15.4 percent on 2011 income of $20.9 million). Former Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain got a lot of attention with his proposed 9-9-9 tax overhaul. Tax reform is a key change in the various blue chip proposals for reducing the long-term federal debt and deficit, such as the Dec. 1, 2010, plan from Erskine Bowles, the former Clinton chief of staff, and Alan Simpson, former Republican senator from Wyoming. President Obama joined the fray in his State of the Union address on Jan. 24, when he called for anyone with an annual income of more than $1 million to pay a minimum effective tax rate of 30 percent.
Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/finance/tax-reform-is-coming-with-many-deserving-targets-01302012.html
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