Word: coded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Internal Revenue Code is 2,052 pages long. To create it took decades of late-night horse trading, millions of pages of expert testimony and billions of dollars in political contributions, often pledged after (taxdeductible) three-martini lunches. To understand it requires the services of a well- paid lawyer. To reform it demands a monumental effort of political will...
...Ronald Reagan, the consummate salesman, tax reform promises to be the hardest sell of his presidency. This week he will launch a ballyhooed campaign to convince Congress that political salvation lies in rebuffing the swarms of special interests whose loopholes now ventilate the tax code. His method of persuasion, as ever, will be to preach over the heads of Congressmen to the voters who elect them...
...package he will unveil, though already frayed by the persistent chafing of special interests, is still highly ambitious, at least when measured against the cautious norms of political reality. By closing or narrowing a raft of loopholes, it would simplify the tax code and allow reduced rates without loss of revenue to the Treasury. Most taxpayers would shell out less, the President will emphatically advertise, while businesses and the wealthy would be stripped of shelters that now reduce or even eliminate their tax burden. The top rate would drop from 50% to 35%; middle-income taxpayers would...
Having secured many concessions from the Administration, the business lobbyists who have been so successful in the past at leaving their Gucci- prints on obscure passages of the tax code are now storming Capitol Hill. They are handing out political-action committee checks (last year: $74.3 million for the House alone) and collecting IOUs. "You're looking at an awful lot of deals, and an awful lot of fund raisers, before you see any kind of tax bill," warns Panetta. By the time Congress finishes weighing the reasoned arguments of all the different lobbyists, as well as their PAC contributions...
...minimum tax offends the tax-reform purists, who argue that it would leave the tax code just as complex and contorted, although perhaps a bit less egregiously unfair. "The weeds would be topped," says Rostenkowski, "but the roots would remain." Indeed, some see a minimum tax as a cynical ruse to avoid real tax reform. "Want to see a specialinterest lobbyist grin over his three-martini lunch?" scoffs a report released last week by the House Republican Conference. "Threaten him with a corporate minimum...