Cutting taxes
If, as columnist Bob Novak famously said, God put Republicans on this earth to cut taxes, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Minnesota Republican, appears to be a true believer.
Speaking Friday at the Heritage Foundation before the monthly gathering of the Conservative Women's Network, Mrs. Bachmann called tax legislation being drafted by Rep. Charles B. Rangel, New York Democrat and chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, "the mother of all tax increases."
The freshman lawmaker said Mr. Rangel's proposal — nominally intended to address the unintended, but imminent, increase in the tax burden of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) on the middle class — would raise taxes $3.5 trillion over 10 years.
If nothing is done, she said, over the next 10 years the AMT will raise taxes $841 billion.
"You think taxes are high now?" Mrs. Bachmann, 51, told the mostly female audience at the event, co-sponsored by the Herndon-based Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute. "You will see the death of job creation in this country."
Mrs. Bachmann, a former state senator and one of two freshman Republican women in the House, is co-sponsor of a Republican tax-reform alternative to the Rangel measure.
But unlike Mr. Rangel's legislation, the Taxpayer Choice Act — which, among other things, would make permanent the capital-gains and dividend tax relief of 2003 — would also repeal the AMT.
"Just get rid of it," she said. |
