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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (159342)	1/30/2003 4:28:24 PM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1583653

Kerry's estate tax cut elimination is only for top 2% of Americans. Most of the rest get an immediate tax break. Small businesses also get nice incentives to hire not fire employees. And as I've said the top 2% have plenty of loopholes to avoid estate taxes. For instance, they can afford to buy big life insurance policies and have trust funds for their kids. On Kerry's lan: Cutting the payroll tax is also very “progressive” because the payroll tax itself is so “regressive.” Low-income workers pay proportionately much more than high income ones. After earning their first $84,900, high earners are done with paying Social Security taxes for the year; only the small Medicare tax is applied to all earned income. Sound like an idea a presidential candidate could love? Well, John Kerry loves it and became the first Democratic candidate to latch on to it. For a man on the stump, comparing a payroll tax cut to the elimination of the estate tax for the wealthiest 2 percent of American families, makes for some fairly decent sound bytes. One obvious objection to the idea is that a onetime tax cut is essentially a gimmick. It’s not certain to have any short-term impact and it makes no long-term contribution to the economy. The other objection is that a FICA cut could be seen as jeopardizing the sanctity of the Social Security trusts, which it doesn’t. It’s not just lefties searching for centrist voters who are pushing the Hot Idea. The Business Roundtable, a policy-bastion of the corporate establishment, is hawking it too. They believe it’s the quickest way to stimulate the economy, and the broadest, giving the largest possible number of taxpayers more money to spend or invest. John Kerry, Robert Reich and the CEOs of the Roundtable – pretty strange bedfellows. The Bushies aren’t jumping into bed. But they’ve swiped the opposition’s playbook before (can you say “homeland security”) and maybe they’ll do it again.