Find The Boots

TaxProf Blog reports that aTax Court Applied AMT to Nurse with $121k Salary". The court said

The unfortunate consequences of the AMT in various circumstances have been litigated since shortly after the adoption of the AMT. In many different contexts, literal application of the AMT has led to a perceived hardship, but challenges based on equity have been uniformly rejected.

I wonder if this nurse voted for the Democrats that thought the AMT was such a good idea?

Try as you may to "soak the rich", these "progressive" taxes always hurt the poor and middle class much worse than the rich. Rich people can afford lawyers and accountants. The rest of us can't. And if you succeed in taxing the rich, they'll either decide to stop making more money because they've got better things to do with their time, or they'll just move their business activities offshore. So your job either goes away or goes to India.

It's a crime that it takes me several days to figure out my tax liability each year. And my situation isn't all that complicated.

The power to tax is the power to destroy. If you want to limit a behavior, taxing it is a good means to that end. So why in the world do we tax income? Do we really want people to not work and make as much money as they can?

I wish the consumption tax debate would restart. Get rid of all income taxes. Declare survival type items such as non-luxury foods to be tax free. Everything else gets taxed. Tax luxury items or things that you want to discourage. Everybody pays tax according to what they consume. That's about as "fair" as you can made the tax code. The effect on savings and investment would be astronomical.

Instead of a hidden payroll tax that people don't even realize is there, they'd be confronted with the cost of their government every time they bought something. That can only be a good thing. Need to spend money on the military to protect our foreign oil? Finance the increase with taxes on gasoline. That might get us off the dime on alternative energy and developing domestic oil.

The same people that bash Bush for Iraq are angry at him for gas prices. I wonder what will happen to the price of oil if we just surrender and go home? A consumption tax would put things into perspective.