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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (41768)	10/2/2000 8:40:20 PM
From: Mr. Whist	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Looks like it's back to the drawing board for GWB on his tax-cut plan. Headline: Study Finds Hole In Bush Tax Plan by JIM ABRAMS Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nearly 27 million Americans would not get the full benefit of George W. Bush's tax cuts because they would become subject to another tax originally designed to prevent investors and the wealthy from sheltering too much of their income, a congressional analysis found. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a bipartisan congressional panel, said some 12.2 million Americans would see smaller than anticipated reductions under the GOP presidential nominee's 10-year $1.3 trillion tax cut plan because they become subject to the alternative minimum tax. That's in addition to 14.7 million who under current law will have to pay the AMT by 2010 and thus will be eligible for a reduced or no tax break. The panel, in a report prepared for Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said increased exposure to the minimum tax could reduce the size of Bush's tax relief by $192 billion over 10 years. ''Governor Bush has advertised his tax plan as simple: 'If you pay income tax, you get a tax cut,''' Rangel said Monday. ''But the governor's statements disagree with the facts regarding his tax plan. The fact of the matter is millions of taxpayers will not receive any tax reduction from the Bush plan.'' Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said the alternative minimum tax, in its current structure, was a ''pernicious little thing'' that Republicans sought to substantially repeal when they took control of Congress in 1995. He noted that President Clinton vetoed that legislation. ''Unlike Clinton-Gore, who vetoed AMT relief, the Bush government will look forward to working with Congress to protecting more Americans from AMT,'' he said. The alternative minimum tax is essentially a parallel income tax system created in 1969 to ensure that the wealthy and corporations could not entirely escape taxes through write-offs and other legal means. Income is taxed at up to 28 percent. The Joint Committee said that in 2002 some 3 million tax returns would be affected by the minimum tax under current law, and that figure could grow to 14.7 million by 2010 because of rising incomes and the fact that the AMT rate brackets are not indexed for inflation. It said the Bush tax plan would increase those numbers by an additional 12.2 million. One aspect of Bush's proposal, doubling the $500 tax credit for children, does extend a current law to protect taxpayers from the minimum tax. But his plans to reduce regular income tax rates, which now range from 15 percent to 39.6 percent, to a range of 10 percent to 33 percent, would subject more people to the alternative minimum tax. The Joint Committee gave as an example a taxpayer whose regular income tax is $10,000 and who has a tentative AMT of $9,500. Even if, under a tax cut, that person's regular income tax was reduced to $9,000, his or her tax liability would stay at the AMT level of $9,500.