Columbia

With that, I agree, however, why should the owner of a $500K home be able to deduct the mortgage interest (from someone who can't afford one and is only able to deduct interest on a $75K house?).

Columbia

Yep-I wrote almost the same thing at the same time. I can't wait to see his response.

Elvis90

Get rid of all the deductions and do a "Fair Tax", standard 10-15% across the board, or do a Value Added Tax or National Sales Tax which would equally tax consumption.

The Cavalier

It's even worse than that. Our elected and appointed officials reimburse the federal government full coach fare for the time they use federally operated jets for personal use. That angers me more than Tiger Woods getting a tax break for the purchase of a GV.

Columbia

Alex, Geddy, and Neil hammering away. Learning to play La Villa Strangiato myself.

forgot to bid

the thing about private aircraft tax deductions it's really not a simple as it used to be to write off the entire airplane. I used to have to keep a log of who had been on the jet and why and hand it over to aviation tax attorneys to do a bunch of calculations on. There was also a question about whether you had active or passive income and that determined if you could write it off and when they made that change a whole lot of owners lost the ability to write their jets off. Pardon me though, im trying to remember back six years ago on this stuff.

Don't forget you do pay a lot in property taxes on multi million dollar jets and in Florida it's really expensive. So much so they record how long private jets remain in Florida and if it hits a threshold they come after you for property taxes even if the airplane is not based there.

But ending the tax write off, which I understand completely is tough to accept, would probably shut down Gulfstream, Cessna, Piper, Learjet, Beechcraft/Hawker, Bombardier and a lot of other manufacturers over night as well as their vendors and suppliers, maintenance providers and so on. There might still be jets, but rarely would they be new. It could happen, but I think it would create a loss in taxes paid to the government and not an increase.

scambo1

I think you and I are somewhat on the same page except for raising taxes on people by 10%.

Shrink the government.

Cut unearned entitlements.

"Pay as you go" taxes cant be raided for other projects.

What we have now is cuts to programs that people have paid for and that taxpayers will feel. If you cut programs that people don't pay for, there will be incentive for people to go back to work. If the answer is to keep taking from those who work, there will never be a solution, but instead a deepening problem.

When people can "retire" from the workforce because they choose to use drugs (drug addicts, federally, are defined as disabled) they get paid to stay in a government supplied house, to go to government supplied programs, to eat government supplied food and wear government supplied clothes, recieve government supplied education, etc. They have 24 hours/ day to continue to conduct illicit activities - either further earning illegal money or whatever.

We would be on the right track if we started to do away will all such ridiculous programs.

As far as towers and airport infrastructure, taxes and fees are already on the books. Quit diverting those to non-performing programs and then let's see where we are.

qball

Possible fix?

Elvis90

Good one Scambo - concur.

Columbia

I've made thousands of dollars in dividends over the past 20 years of which I only paid 15% tax on. In the grand scheme of things, it's probably not fair to someone paying much more than that in Federal, state, and Medicare.