President Bush's reform panel's plan erases most tax breaks...

Plan A would:
* Cut the number of income tax brackets from six to four – 15 percent, 25 percent, 30 percent and 33 percent.
* Eliminate the marriage penalty.
* Revamp capital gains taxes so that stocks and dividends would only be taxed at the individual level, not the corporate one, too.
* Eliminate deductions for state and local taxes.
* Limit the home mortgage deduction
* Expand the capital gains exclusion on home sales from $500,000 to $600,000 for couples.
* Cap the amount of tax-free money an employer could pay for a workers' health insurance plan to $11,500 for families. Anything paid above that threshold would be treated as taxable income to the worker.
* Reduce the variety of tax-advantaged retirement and health savings plans to just three types: "save for retirement" accounts, which would replace IRAs and deferred compensation plans; "save for work" accounts, which would replace employer-provided retirement savings plans like 401(k)s; "save for family" accounts, which would replace health savings, medical savings and flex-spending accounts.

Plan B would:
* Impose a flat tax of 15 percent for individuals on capital gains, interest and dividends
* Reduced the number of income tax brackets from six to four – 15 percent, 25 percent, 30 percent and 33 percent
* Allow for a limited mortgage interest deduction; and
* Eliminate the AMT


What do you guys/gals think?

...and I am not willing to give him one more dime of my money to waste in some payback deal with his cronies. If he wants to change the tax structure, then he needs to start looking at making the people who actually HAVE money pay their fair share.

...what the PLAN is - regular taxpayers will pay through the nose while the rich get another tax break.

Yes, I read the list. Yes, I've heard it all before. I used to be Republican. I used to hear every tax cut floated that you can imagine.

My conclusion is Bush can't be trusted with tax dollars. Period.

thriving auto industry needs as they attempt to unload their overpriced, overweight, overconsuming vehicles. This is the third time Detroit has painted itself into the same corner. It happened around 1960, then again in the '70's and now for a third time they have the wrong products to market.

Eliminate state taxes? Are they kidding? That's a huge tax increase, at least in my state. The home mortgage deduction is another biggie.

There are some killers for the middle class, but some hidden benefits for the upper 1%, such as eliminating rather than indexing or revising the AMT. Flat tax on passive income.

They'd be better off simply rescinding all the tax cuts. That, of course, would be completely off the table.

employee counting it as income is frightening. So you fall from one of Bechtel's coal towers and need extensive health care and you can end up being taxed for it. That is definitely a tax on the working poor and the middle class. Pigs!

* Cap the amount of tax-free money an employer could pay for a workers' health insurance plan to $11,500 for families. Anything paid above that threshold would be treated as taxable income to the worker.

It seems like a pretty high cap -- does your employer spend anywhere near $1,000 per month on health insurance per employee? Remember this is not medical expenses, which can easily exceed that amount, but the average monthly insurance bill.

I suspect that it's targeted either at very expensive executive coverage or at some kind of tax avoidance scheme in which compensation is disguised as insurance. Just guessing, though -- the $11,500 is a strange number.

I do not have health care from my employee who is a small historical society and bed and breakfast.

distancing themselves from most of this plan and tons of spin about how these are just hypothetical ideas.

It would seem so.

Yesterday I called both of my rethug U.S. Senate members offices to complain about the waste of my tax payer dollars on incompetent employees in the White House and executive branch. I went on a bit about all of these political hacks being given real jobs and hoped that my senators had not rewarded political hacks with jobs at the public trough as well.

Why don't we demand they take tax breaks away from them FIRST. This is a load of shit and the goddamned right wing is going to latch on to the 15% tax bracket and not even know they're already in it. This is a piece of trash.

They already get more money from the federal government than they deserve, but this is disgusting. I live in California and I'm a homeowner. Because selfish primitive states like Tennessee and Texas don't want to have any income taxes, our money goes to help them through their endless shortfalls. Now, we'll be penalized even more. As it is, we get less federal monies than the selfish little states who don't want to pay into the local system.

Conservatives pride themselves on being more self-sustaining, but this is ridiculous: they suck the blood of others while feeling no sense of coexistence.

This is outrageous. Couple this with the high cost of housing here, and any change in the current laws gets really ugly. NO ATTEMPT TO LIMIT MORTGAGE INTEREST DEDUCTION IS FAIR UNLESS TIED TO LOCAL OR STATEWIDE PRICES.

If the interest is capped at $350K, how does that work in a state with a median house cost of $494K? (Yep, that's what it is in California; hell, a tiny little 892 square foot place down the street sold for $679K. Did you get that? This is hardly Beverly Hills, this is 2 miles from downtown.)

Looking at this, we get fucked in every way possible. Someone in one of those red states with NO income taxes will be able to live in a palace and be able to write off all the interest as before, whereas those of us in states that give a fuck about the world will pay income taxes, not be able to deduct them from federal taxes, and lose a deduction on what is a much smaller home.

This is the heart of the modern conservative movement: fuck everybody else.

We pay HUGE taxes, both local (property taxes) state and federal. We support this country, but that's not enough for the greedheads; they want us to foot the bill for ALL OF IT. Yeah, fine. The problem is that it simply isn't possible.

People advocating this are deeply ugly. They have more money than it'd take to choke a bison, but that's not enough. What's scary is that the precarious balance of this country's economy can't sustain what it's already called upon to shoulder, fucking those who sustain it will just make it worse.