Family-Friendly Tax Reform

[wyldwolf]

It's becoming clearer... that Republicans have been false friends to middle-income taxpayers, saving their real affection for the most privileged Americans, from corporate executives to trust-fund babies. The GOP is engaged in a determined campaign to shift the federal tax burden from wealth to work, even as it piles up the largest deficits and debts in U.S. history. And there is every indication that the current talk in Republican circles of a "tax reform" initiative in the near future will lead in exactly the same direction, through reduction or elimination of progressive income tax rates; vast new shelters for investment income; or even an abandonment of income taxes altogether for a national sales tax that would hit middle-income families even harder than the current system.

But "tax reform" need not become a guise for regressive tax policy.

Read about Paul Weinstein's "Family Friendly Tax Reform" here:

http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=125&subsecid=163&contentid=253276

Some of the major points are:

* A College Tax Credit to replace five current tax incentives, providing a credit against tax liability (and refundable for low-income families with little or no tax liability) of up to $3000 per year for four years of college and two years of graduate school.

* A Universal Home Mortgage Interest Deduction that would expand the single most important middle-class tax break to people who don't itemize deductions (which would also reduce the number of taxpayers who have to file the "long form").

* A Family Tax Credit that would replace the incredibly complex set of our existing incentives (the Earned Income Tax, the Child Credit, the Additional Child Credit, and the Child and Dependent Care Credit) with a simple, single credit that would provide as much as $7,000 for families with three kids. This proposal is similar to one proposed earlier by Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL).

* A Universal Pension incentive, replacing 16 existing IRA-type tax-preferred accounts with a single retirement account, portable from job to job, and benefiting from a $500 start-up credit.

more...

I'm not sure if this plan is the right one, but with the GOP pushing tax reform, we need to counter.