Columns

Fiscal nonsense

Hernando Today
Published: December 26, 2012

BY LEN TRIA, Uncommon Sense

Now that most of the politicians have left Washington to go home for the Christmas holiday and the president is in Hawaii to enjoy a vacation the rest of us can look forward to more taxes in the New Year.

Remember when the President said no one making under $250,000 would see an increase in taxes? Well get set for some increases that may knock your socks off. To begin with the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) which was originally designed to get a handful of millionaires to pay income taxes is now going to affect millions of middle income Americans because the Congress has not corrected the problem.

A total of 27 percent of taxpayers who paid the AMT in 2008 had adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 or less. Here is a real problem that the Congress should fix by eliminating the AMT altogether; yet it is something that we rarely hear the politicians talking about.

The whole stupid tax code of some 70,000 pages is obsolete and should be eliminated and replaced with a simpler more understandable replacement. The flat tax could be the answer as everyone would pay a rate that would be lower and deductions would be reduced and everyone would pay something to support our government.

Of course that would make too much sense so I doubt if the brains in Washington would ever consider it. The President wants to raise taxes on the wealthy, those making over $200,000 a year ($250,000 for couples) to raise $800 billion over 10 years but he wants to spend $500 billion on some unnamed stimulus program, not cut any so-called entitlement programs and continue with one trillion dollar deficits each year which adds to our debt.

So let me see if we add $800 billion in new revenue and we spend $500 billion that leaves us $300 billion to the good over the decade plus we add one trillion a year in deficits that comes to 10 trillion in new debt plus the 6 trillion we have now accumulated equals 16 trillion in government debt.

If that is what the President and his party call debt reduction then line up for a great buy I have in the form of ownership shares in a beautiful bridge in New York City. The sad truth is that the politicians in Washington are like a furnace that can only be satisfied by adding more and more fuel which in this case is money.

They have no regard for the country as a whole but rather only for their small special interests that they keep feeding "pork" to keep them happy. Latest example is the appropriation for the victims of Sandy that the politicians want millions in "pork earmarks" in order to pass the Bill. With government like this there is no hope of ever getting spending under control much less making a serious effort to pay down the national debt.