If you’re among the one-third of taxpayers who itemize deductions on their federal tax returns, the IRS says you can take your time filing your 2010 tax return. Or rather you have to take your time. The IRS won’t let itemizers (or people who claim either the college tuition or educator expense deductions) file until [...]

As usual in December, personal finance columns are filled with end-of-year tax advice—all those things you should do before New Year’s to cut your tax bill. But 2010’s end-of-year issues are different: This year, it’s Congress and the president who need to act fast on a long list of tax policies. Everyone knows about the [...]

The alternative minimum tax, America’s favorite stealth levy, threatens to hit 27 million taxpayers this year if Congress doesn’t patch it once again. Given legislators’ apparent determination to defer any action on tax issues until after the election, an AMT fix will likely come late in the year, if at all. A quick review of [...]

It has become a regular stop on Washington’s fiscal merry-go-round: Congress patches the Alternative Minimum Tax for a year or two, but leaves future fixes for mañana. For instance, the Senate Budget Committee’s new fiscal blueprint makes room to fix the AMT for one year only and assumes money will be found from somewhere to pay for future patches. In its fiscal 2011 budget, the Obama Administration also assumes the AMT will be repaired, but buries the cost in its baseline and makes no effort to find the money to pay for the fix.

Congress is absolutely right to end the decade-old fantasy that it wants to trim Medicare payments to doctors. This law has been on the books for 12 years and is annually ignored. Lawmakers should stop pretending. But I fear they will make this change without paying for it–adding $250 billion to the national debt over the next decade.

After I wrote about how Obama’s tax proposals would cut taxes for many wealthy households, some readers objected that I’d ignored the fact that the alternative minimum tax (AMT) would wipe out any potential tax savings. I had commented that the AMT could, in fact, do just that, but TPC had not yet estimated how many taxpayers would be affected. Research assistant Katie Lim has now generated those estimates and they show, as expected, that the AMT would take the potential tax cut away from many people.

This will surprise nobody who follows what is optimistically called the budget process, but the economic stimulus package wending its way through Congress has become the vehicle for an astonishing array of stuff. It’s become even better than emergency supplemental appropriations, which have been used to fund decidedly predictable items, like the decennial census and continuing outlays for the Iraq war (long after the initial shock and awe had worn off).

Barack Obama’s tax plan will either raise $262 billion over the next 10 years or increase the national debt by $2.7 trillion. John McCain would add either $615 billion or $3.6 trillion to the debt.
What’s going on? Don’t everyone turn your computer off at once, but we need to talk about budget baselines.

It is a nice object lesson in how a couple of obscure changes in the tax law can save a few people a lot of money. The IRS has reported that the number of those earning $200,000 or more who paid no taxes rose sharply in 2005. More than 7,300 of these worthies avoided U.S. income tax entirely, two-and-a-half times the year before. About 85,000 paid worldwide taxes of less than 10% of their income.

Howard Gleckman continues to think that temporary tax cuts are no better than permanent ones from the standpoint of enhancing political accountability and fiscal restraint (“Tax Extenders and Fiscal Restraint,” May 22, 2008). So here’s some data.