The Republican Plan Is the Opposite of Tax Reform
The Senate tax-cut bill contains, among other obnoxious features, a special tax break for owners of private planes. There is a federal excise tax on private travel on the books, but the new tax would exempt “storage, maintenance, and fueling, and those related to its operation, such as the hiring and training of pilots and crew, as well as administrative services such as scheduling, flight planning, weather forecasting, obtaining insurance, and establishing and complying with safety standards,” among other things. Rather than treat these costs as consumption, the Senate Republicans are exempting them as necessities of life. What are these people supposed to do — fly commercial, like animals?
The tax break for private planes is the sort of provision that is usually held up as a case for what tax reform is needed to eliminate. In this case, it is being created by tax reform. That is one clue that the “tax reform” plan being drawn up in Congress is nothing of the sort.
The goal of a tax-reform plan, as the term has been historically understood, has been to minimize political interference in the tax code. The tax code might charge a rich person a higher rate than a poor person, but it doesn’t want to charge a butcher who earns $50,000 more than a baker who earns $50,000 just because the baker did a better job lobbying Congress.
There are legitimate questions about how to define “income.” Traditionally, if you give money to charity, it’s assumed that money is not part of your income, since you can’t consume it. The same assumption has applied to money paid to state and local government in taxes. Republicans want to make at least some of that money taxable. Conveniently, that means states with higher property and income taxes — which happen to be blue states — would get hit by this tax change.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-republican-plan-is-the-opposite-of-tax-reform/ar-BBFivAc?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=edgsp
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