Don’t look now, but common sense is breaking out all over Capitol Hill.
In the span of two short weeks, one or both houses of Congress have passed tax cuts or prevented tax hikes. And there may be more to come.
First, the good news.
- At the end of April, the Senate passed a four-year moratorium on taxing high-speed Internet connections. An original ban had expired and states were just itching to get their tax hooks into cyberspace. But a 93-3 vote quashed that notion. And better still, the House version makes the ban permanent. Maybe, just maybe, the House side will win when the two bodies work out their differences.
- In the same week, the House voted to make relief from the marriage penalty tax permanent. The lopsided vote, 323-95, suggests that the Senate will find it hard to let the marriage penalty go back into effect
- And May 5, the House put the brakes on a truly insidious tax – the alternative minimum tax – by a whopping 333-89 vote. Next year an estimated 9 million more households -– mostly middle-class -– would get hit with this “soak the rich” tax, and they would have to pay about $17.8 billion more in taxes. The fix is just temporary, but the Treasury Department wanted time to develop a long-term fix. (Note to Treasury Secretary John Snow: Abolish it. That’ll fix it.)
As for what’s to come, there’s reason to hope. Two other tax cuts are set to expire at the end of the year: an increase in the child care tax credit and an expansion of the lowest income bracket.
Members of both bodies say they want to make those cuts permanent. In an election year, those are popular cuts to get behind.
With that kind of reasoning, then, wouldn’t it make sense to get behind making all the tax cuts of 2001 permanent? Wouldn’t that be popular?
Most of all, wouldn’t that just make common sense?