>> The good news for Mr. Romney is the forms suggest that he paid at least some federal income tax every year, as he has said he did.
So, Harry Reid is a dirty liar, just as you were told. And there is plenty of information in the 2010 return to tell you Romney paid taxes, just as I told you last week.
>> Foreign tax credits are highly prized because they reduce tax liability on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Every dollar of credit is a dollar in tax saved, unlike deductions, which reduce only taxable income. Most American taxpayers don’t have foreign bank accounts or partnerships in the Cayman Islands, but many get a foreign tax credit because they own mutual funds that invest on foreign exchanges. Foreign taxes paid by the funds are passed on to shareholders in the form of tax credits. The rationale is that people shouldn’t be taxed more than once on the same income.
I've prepared hundreds of tax returns for ordinary individuals who claimed foreign tax credits. It has nothing at all to do with whether one has foreign bank accounts, although it is certainly possible to have both a foreign bank account and a foreign tax credit, if the account gives rise to earnings.
>> “The U.S. tax laws for foreign income are a horrible mess,” Daniel Shaviro, professor of taxation at New York University School of Law, told me this week. “It’s insanely complex.”
It is. All the more reason you dolts that listen to the liberal media on this subject who are totally clueless make you even more clueless than they are.
>> I even took the online course offered by the I.R.S. to try to understand the complex calculations.
My God. He took an online course from IRS? You'd think he was a tax expert. ROTFLMAO.
I got a Master's in tax and had more questions when I finished than when I started. It isn't something you learn in an online course from IRS.
You think this guy understands the concept of "cash basis" accounting for tax returns? Apparently not.
>> The I.R.S. has struggled for years to cap the foreign tax credit at the amount an American would have paid in tax on that same income in the United States, so as not to subsidize higher-tax foreign governments, but with limited success. One of the basic problems with the foreign tax credit, Professor Shaviro observed, is “it’s overgenerous.”
Making the statement that it is "overgenerous" is a value judgment, not a professional one. And frankly, it is more of an international economics issue than a tax issue. You can't tax people on their world wide incomes and not give them credits for taxes paid in other countries. Period. If you did that you would have situations where people wouldn't earn enough to pay their damned taxes which is directly contrary to the "wherewithal to pay" doctrine established in the 40s.
>> The big foreign tax credit that year “makes no sense to me at all,” Professor Shaviro said. “We have no idea what he actually did.” But if it is the result of some kind of tax shelter,
It makes no sense to him but he KNOWS it is a result of a tax shelter and not merely a foreign investment? How does he know this?
>> Professor Hines added: “Lots of people are speculating about the source of this tax credit, but at this point it’s just conjecture.
Better answer, but followed by, this time, a political judgment -- and a pretty lousy one at that.
>> If it was up to me, I’d wipe out the credit, wipe out the deferrals, and simply tax all foreign income at a single low rate.”
Great. And so you'd have the same fucking effect as the current tax code. You earn money that is taxed somewhere else at 15%, report it your 35% income tax return with a 15% FTC, and you end up paying 20%. WTF difference does it make?
Yet another hatchet job from the NYT. |
