Posted on 11/12/2007 12:06:26 PM PST by hh007
Nov. 12, 2007 (SmartPros) -- The U.S. Chamber of Commerce expressed its disappointment over the Temporary Tax Relief Act of 2007, passed by the House on Friday.
The nearly $80 billion bill includes provisions that provide alternative minimum tax relief, and extends a number of tax provisions set to expire this year.
The bill is not "tax relief" as advertised in its title, the Chamber said, but a tax shift from individual taxpayers to businesses, putting American jobs and the economy at a disadvantage compared with our growing global competitors.
"While the Chamber supports an extension of alternative minimum tax relief and the extension of expiring tax provisions, it believes that these provisions should not be paid for with onerous new taxes on American workers and businesses," said Bruce Josten, the Chamber's executive vice president for Government Affairs. "The AMT was never intended to be the revenue generator it has become; rather, it was intended to ensure that all Americans pay their fair share of taxes."
There are many provisions that the U.S. Chamber supports in the tax bill, including the extension of the deduction for state and local general sales tax, the R&D credit, the 15-year straight-line cost recovery for qualified leasehold improvements and qualified restaurant improvements, expensing for "brownfield" environmental remediation costs, the railroad track maintenance credit, the enhanced charitable deduction for contributions of food inventory, and the enhanced deduction for corporate contributions of computer equipment for education.
"The Chamber strongly opposes increasing taxes on carried interest, making changes to nonqualified deferred compensation, and deferring the implementation of interest allocation rules," said Josten. "The Chamber will fight hard to remove these unfair provisions from the tax bill and will key vote this bill."
The bill was sponsored by Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
bla bla bla ad nauseum.
Nothing will change with this stupid law. They should just pass HR25 and be done with it.
And,,,, as I keep tellin’ my liberal friends, if you tax businesses more, they will just have to charge you more for their products and services. But,,, they just don’t get it!
Something else they don't get is that wage(or salary if you will)increases do not really help workers. The increases are simply passed on as higher prices and we end up paying the same percentage of our wages for the same goods and services. In fact sometimes we come out on the loser end with wage increases. I am talking about blanket increases, for a whole company, not individual increases, but even then you eventually wind up paying more because those increases are factored into price also.
The Democrats fail to grasp that the strategy of “....don’t tax you, don’t tax me ...tax that guy behind the tree..” just temporarily shifts the tax burden. In the end consumers will always pay the tax placed on business in the form of higher prices. However, taxing businesses more also means those same businesses can’t afford to employ as many workers.
How about rewriting the AMT right out of the code or adjust it for inflation as was intended. That way we don’t need to be “rescued” every year from it.
The recent turmoil in the stock market correlates very strongly with the progress of this tax bill since Rangel first introduced it. At each step, the market has strongly voted with its pocketbook to object to the tax grab disguised as AMT relief. The talk-talk-talk about oil prices, sub-prime loans, and dollar depreciation is a distraction. The news on each of those issues is months old. The recent gyrations are a result of the financial community trying to fulfill it s fiduciary duty by re-running their economic models with the new tax provisions. It is safe to say that those models suggest the new tax provisions are bad for the market and economy at large.
In this environment, minimum wage increases actually raise illegal immigration and illegal employment.
As the gap between what the lowest level jobs are worth and what employers must legally pay (with FIT, SIT, FICA, FUTA, SUTA, etc.), plus the threat of OSHA, EEOC, EPA, IRS and other alphabet agency complaints from legal employees, hiring illegals becomes more and more tempting.
If I have to pay out $11.50 per hour in real dollars for a legal employee (by adding in all the costs of a full-time person with benefits) or $5.00 an hour to an illegal, and if my business is struggling, it’s mighty tempting to hire those who don’t cost a lot and don’t complain.
Heard this bill being discussed by Republican Congressmen on the floor of the House. It made my hair stand on end. I bet it has been analyzed as you said by the country’s economic / market people who clearly understand this bill will torpedo economic growth. As I understood it, there are some provisions in this bill that will tank housing construction similar to what the disastrous 1986 legislation did at that time to the real estate market, leading to the total collapse of hundreds of Savings and Loans ......and forcing the Federal government to do the multi billion dollar bailouts and takeovers of realestate all over the nation.
I witnessed that legislation’s destruction first hand as it destroyed a local savings and loan which had been a solid, conservatively run, Savings and Loan. But they went out of business.
If this legislation is not vetoed.....or changed as it is.....we can expect a major economic crash/downturn from its side effects in 2008 leading right up to the election in which the Demoniacs can claim the worst economy in a century and attribute it to President Bush while all the while having SPONSORED that economic “policy” and the resulting hardship that will detrimentally affect millions of Americans.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.