Word: taxing
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...convoluted from the start, but it offered oodles of money to the participants. An American investor agreed to lease tram and subway cars from BVG, Berlin's mass-transit company. And BVG, in turn, leased them back for terms ranging from 12 to 30 years. Under U.S. tax law at the time, the American investor was able to take a depreciation tax benefit on the equipment because it was held on a long-term lease - a financial benefit the investor shared with BVG. (Read about Paris' public bicycle system...
...they quickly paid off. Over the many deals, BVG received cash payments from the American investors totaling €68.9 million, or about $90.6 million at current exchange rates. BVG in turn paid the American investors monthly rent to use the equipment, a return the Americans enhanced with that big tax break. For its part, BVG used the money it derived from the deals to pay down debt, which has saved it €35 million ($46 million) in interest payments. It was a shell game of sorts, but everyone made out - except, of course, the U.S. taxpayers, who were unwittingly subsidizing...
Most of the CBL contracts with German municipal authorities were concluded in the late '90s. After a while, the IRS caught on to what was clearly a tax scam on the part of the American investors. The tax write-off applied to purchases of foreign infrastructure assets. But the German assets were not purchased; they were being leased. So in 2004 the loophole was closed...
...worst economic downturn since the 1930s, the moment of reckoning is already almost here: according to both the budget proposed by the White House in February and projections issued by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in March, Social Security benefits ($659 billion, according to the CBO) will exceed payroll taxes ($653 billion) in fiscal 2009 for the first time since 1984. Payroll-tax receipts generally hold up much better in recessions than do income taxes, but job losses have been so severe that the CBO expects them to decline slightly from 2008, while benefits rise almost 9% because of cost...
...government - as opposed to individual states - to recognize gay couples as married. Even talk of federally recognized civil unions is meaningless until DOMA is repealed, since the act also prohibits the appearance of marriage, no matter what the relationship is called. It's why gays can't enjoy the tax benefits that straight couples do, for instance, and why spouses of gay federal employees cannot be covered by government health plans. (See a radical solution to the gay-marriage controversy...