Thursday, April 13, 2006

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The AMT shell game: Why Bush's tax "cuts" aren't Over at Slate, Daniel Gross is explaining, once more, the role the Alternative Minimum Tax continues to play in the Bush administration's deceptive tax policies. The AMT is a bizarre parallel-universe of taxation with its own set of complex rules that differ from the normal IRS system. It was passed decades ago as an effort to prevent gazillionaires from using elaborate tax shelters to reduce their tax bills to zero. For many years it was easily ignored by the vast majority of Americans, and as recently as a few years ago the only non-super-rich people who worried about it were tech-industry types who'd hit the stock-option jackpot but played their cards wrong. But the AMT was designed with its very own time-bomb: It was never indexed for inflation, and so each year the rising tide of inflation -- even the slow, relatively benign inflation the U.S. has experienced in the last decade -- lifts more and more middle-class Americans into its maw. The obvious answer is to fix it, either by repeal or by indexing it for inflation so it continues to apply only to the gazillionaires who were its original target. Shouldn't be so hard, right? Wrong. Because all those improbable Bush Administration forecasts of gradual deficit reduction depend on vast new federal revenue from the AMT. If you "fix" the AMT, you plunge the government way deeper in the debt hole than even the shysters running Bush's fiscal policy could defend. In other words, those big tax cuts that the administration keeps demanding be made permanent aren't tax cuts at all -- they're tax transfers. The Bush policy is simple: Let's cut taxes on dividends -- which happen to fall most heavily on the wealthiest Americans -- and raise taxes, via the AMT, on the upper-middle class (and increasingly, the middle class). Right now, the AMT is kicking in on two-income families with kids earning $100,000 or more in high-tax states like California and New York. (And yes, it's been often noted that the AMT tends to hurt those in "blue" states most.) Each year the threshold gets lower. Gross warns that this spring the IRS will report big fat gains in federal tax receipts and the Bush team will crow about how successful their supply-side tax cut has been. Don't buy it: They're not cutting taxes, they're playing a shell game, and -- unless we make a point of exposing the fraud and educating ourselves and our neighbors -- we're the suckers. comment [] 12:18:35 PM | permalink

Random links ## "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient" [link courtesy Metafilter]: Ever since I discovered that my aging trove of files written in WordPerfect 4.x was getting harder and harder to rescue from the digital scrapheap, I have made a point of storing all my writing and notes in plain-text form. When the Web came along and I moved my career from print to online, this made even more sense, since for anything that's going to end up as HTML, the detour into some proprietary word-processing format is not merely a waste of time but an active hazard, and at the end of the line you're only going to want plain text anyway. When the whole life-hacks movement got going I was pleased to learn that my own behavior matched those of many uber-geeks who preferred plain text files for their longevity and adaptability. This "word processors" rant is an old piece but it makes a cogent argument for the separation of content from display formatting -- a sensible principle that drives most content-management software and Web-site production tools today. ## Mark Dominus unearths the origin of the "equals" sign in a 16th-century manuscript page -- and in the process, explains a fascinating phase in the development of English in a page from Robert Recorde's "The Whetstone of Witte." [Link courtesy Greg Knauss over at kottke.org]   I had recently learned that the twiddle in the Spanish ñ character was similarly a letter "n". A word like "año" was originally "anno" (as it is in Latin) and the second "n" was later abbreviated to a diacritic over the first "n". (This makes a nice counterpoint to the fact that the mathematical logical negation symbol ∼ was selected because of its resemblance to the letter "N".) But I had no idea that anything of the sort was ever done in English. Recorde's book shows clearly that it was, at least for a time. The short passage illustrated above contains two examples. One is the word "examples" itself, which is written "exãples", with a tilde over the "a". The other is "alteration", which is written "alteratiõ", with a tilde over the "o". More examples abound: "cõpendiousnesse", "nõbers", "denominatiõ", and, I think, "reme~ber". Dominus follows up with more on diacritical marks here. Unlike other European languages, English gradually dropped this practice, but in some alternate universe, we might be spelling "annual" añual. I am always delighted with such evidence of the fluidity and dynamism of English -- the 16th century was a period when the language was constantly soaking up words and structures from other cultures. Shakespeare and his contemporaries took full advantage of the language melee around them, and even as standards and rules coalesced in later centuries, English never adopted a top-down system of rules dictated by some academy (or Academie). Which is why, while I enjoy the pedanticism of a book like "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" as much as anyone else who has ever edited copy, I am happy that no dictator governs the language I work with every day, and that it is free to evolve based on the needs and practices of the people who use it. comment [] 12:14:18 PM | permalink