The AMT and the Fiscal Cliff
26th November 2012
From a political standpoint, it’s hard to imagine a better formula for sparking a taxpayer revolt than to impose a large, unexpected tax increase with little or no warning.
Well, we can’t have a nasty old taxpayer revolt, can we? That would never do. Maybe if we warm up the KY jelly it will make them feel better about it.
The impact would be concentrated in more affluent and urbanized states, particularly those with high state and local taxes (the federal deduction for state and local taxes is one of the breaks that frequently pushes people into the AMT). California’s number of AMT filers would go from 685,000 to more than 5.5 million, according to the Congressional Research Service. New York would go from 477,000 to about 3.9 million. New Jersey would go from 265,000 to almost 2.2 million.
Eventually Democrats will discover that they’re stepping on their own dicks base with this class-warfare tax legislation, since most Really Rich People are Democrats. (George Soros, are ya listenin’?)
Not that I’m going to cry much of a river for tax laws that soak places like California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, D.C., ….
November 27th, 2012 at 12:28
“most Really Rich People are Democrats” I suppose that depends on how you define Really Rich.
Last time I looked–and it wasn’t long ago–the top 15 folks on Forbe’s Richest list were split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Yes, the Democrats hold the top three or four places, but the division tilts more and more to the right the lower you draw the line. I haven’t done the analysis (too bored after a while) but I’d bet that in the top 100 Republicans outnumber Democrats by a 3:2 margin or better.
So make a few more blanket, unsupported generalizations. Seems to be what right-wing thinkers do best.