The AMT patch and the Bush tax cuts have been extended without offsetting tax increases or spending cuts, in part justified by the relatively modest budgetary cost of a short-term extension.
For liberals, it means that, without big unpopular tax increases, government is deeply constrained in its ability to address new challenges.
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According to calculations by the Social Security administration's chief actuary, however, it is possible to transform Social Security fundamentally without resorting to tax increases or benefit cuts if we exercise reasonable restraint on federal spending growth and prudent borrowing to finance the transition to a new system of large personal-retirement accounts.
President Obama, by contrast, is already raising the top marginal tax rate at least to 45%, even without any of the new tax increases he has proposed.
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The GOP cut a deal in January that included tax increases without commensurate spending cuts.
In the years since Missouri passed the Hancock Amendment, which restricts tax increases without a public vote, Missourians have opted to keep relative tax burdens low when faced with their own decision.
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Without a firm date for implementing tax increases, this goal will remain illusory.
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Without any tax or spending revisions, tax increases and spending cuts will take effect as the New Year begins.
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And if so, whether there are enough Republicans open to including tax increases to build a majority without GOP leaders who are adamantly opposed.
Our Founders would be astonished to find that massive, de facto tax increases can be enacted on an industry and its customers without legislative approval.
Tax increases should be set to expire, no matter what, five years from now, without the ability to make them permanent, but in the short term taxes on the truly wealthy need to be raised.
Without the 2010 tax act, federal fiscal policy would have been restrictive this year because of the previously scheduled tax increases and the waning of the effects of ARRA (the stimulus).
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