Word: taxed
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Somewhere on Wall Street there is a hedge-fund manager ruing the day he gave money to a Democrat in 2006. On Nov. 9, the House passed a plan that would raise taxes on the lofty fees and bonuses that hedge-fund and private-equity managers receive. This has placed Senate Democrats, who will next take up the measure, in a quandary. They are compelled to fix the alternative minimum tax (AMT), which hurts big swaths of the middle class even though it was created to ensure that the very rich could not entirely escape paying income tax...
...year stopgap fix that would exempt these middle-income taxpayers from the AMT, at a cost of more than $50 billion. The problem? In a fit of fiscal prudence, the Dems earlier this year passed a requirement mandating that Congress pay for everything it does with either tax hikes or budget cuts. Cue the proposed hedge-fund tax increase...
...which cruised through the Senate Agriculture Committee without a dissenting vote. They blocked it because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to let them bog down the floor debate with scores of unrelated amendments designed to box Democrats into uncomfortable votes on issues like immigration and the alternative minimum tax. Most Senate Republicans like the farm bill just fine - Richard Lugar of Indiana is an honorable exception - but not as much as they like attacking the do-nothing Democratic Congress. They needed 40 votes to block Reid's effort to shut off debate, and they got 42, so Reid yanked...
...what? The coalition of environmentalists, aid groups, health advocates, rural groups, anti-tax activists, sustainable agriculture groups and free traders who fought unsuccessfully for reform will get another chance when the Senate takes up the bill up again - possibly as soon as December, or conceivably as late as 2009. But politicians are amazingly reluctant to oppose farm bills, because they don't want to be portrayed as enemies of the heartland of America, and they don't want to cross the powerful farm lobby...
...Modeling their platform after the famous “Contract with America,” the Republicans wrote a “Covenant with Manchester Taxpayers.” Mandatory referendums on town budgets requiring over 3 percent tax increases; “performance-based accounting”—whereby town departments report progress with statistics rather than subjective reports; and a new town ordinance to combat blight were among the Republicans’ promises...