Jon Porter and the AMT - July 11, 2008
I don’t know how many of you caught Jeff Gillan’s interview with Jon Porter last week, but I did – and I did a double-take when I heard Jon Porter talk about how he was going to fix the alternative minimum tax, which we all know unfairly taxes middle-class taxpayers.
Jon Porter said we should “permanently” fix the AMT, and we could do that by cutting waste in government to replace revenue from the AMT. He said: “Actually, there’s plenty of waste, fraud and abuse in our federal government right now. They’re, y’know, they’re six or seven agencies inspecting pizzas, frozen pizzas, and not that we shouldn’t check our pizzas to make sure they’re safe, but there’s so much bloated government.” My first thought was that’s a lot of pizzas, so I did a little research on how much we’d have to save. I found a January 2007 study by the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, “Options to Fix the AMT,” which estimated the cost over the next 10 years of different options. The cheapest, which is to extend AMT relief for middle-income taxpayers (which Jon Porter recently voted against, by the way), was over $400 billion. The most expensive, repealing the AMT, would cost nearly $800 billion over 10 years. Moreover, if you extend the Bush tax cuts (which Jon Porter supported), it gets even more expensive – over $700 billion to extend AMT relief and more than $1.3 trillion over 10 years if the AMT is repealed. Now we really are talking a lot of pizzas.
The pizza example is ludicrous, of course. But Jon Porter is leading us to believe there is enough waste in government to pay for “permanently” fixing the AMT – hundreds of billions of dollars worth of waste in fact. So, I’m going to be challenging Mr. Porter to cite specific examples, besides pizza inspections, of where he would make these kinds of cuts. And we won’t let him count his past cuts such as student loan programs and veterans benefits. He’ll have to come up with brand new ones. But I’ll give Jon Porter a little head start – by suggesting that he begin by eliminating the tax breaks for oil and gas companies and the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy that he supported.
If Jon Porter can show us the cuts, I’ll be the first one to buy him a pizza with as many toppings as he wants. If he can’t, it’ll be plain cheese.
Dina
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