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| Dysfunctional Congress Duct Tapes Tax Code |
December 21, 2007 |
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How much time do you think the Internal Revenue Service would give a taxpayer to fix a big mistake on a return? How much time should voters give Congress to fix a big mistake in tax law?
When the alternative minimum tax – AMT – was enacted it made a lot of sense. Before the reform, accountants could navigate the tax code so well that some of the country’s richest taxpayers ended up paying nothing. The AMT outflanked that maneuver, pulling the wealthy back into the pool of taxpayers.
But the runaway mechanism devised in 1969 without any automatic indexing or adjustments for inflation started chewing its way down the economic ladder toward the middle class.
Instead of fixing the law, Congress annually slaps a patch on it and keeps the unresolved problem handy for the next game of political football. They tossed it around this year and finally got around to the patch so late that tax return forms will be delayed, pushing back refunds.
But taxpayers, unlike their elected representatives in Washington, will have to complete their end of the deal, the tax returns, before the deadline. Congress should relearn that word, “deadline.” It should complete its budgetary work on time, even if the partisans have to sacrifice by deferring the rhetoric instead of the substance.
And Congress in 2008 should repair a 39-year-old law – permanently – instead of another annual application of duct tape.
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