Tax Lawyer's Blog

President Obama’s healthcare plan raises the 1.45% Medicare payroll tax to 2.35% for families with more than $250,000 of earned income.�
Spread-the-wealther Timothy Noah of Slate wonders why Republicans aren’t making a bigger stink about this tax increase:
Maybe the recession has made solicitude on the part of the rich less plausible to the electorate. Maybe squawking too [...]

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You can call it a healthcare bill if you like, but it would be just as fair to call it a tax increase bill.
Thomas Barthold, Chief of Staff of the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation¹, issued a report scoring the tax proposals of the President’s healthcare plan:
I am providing you with a table of estimates representing [...]

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So much for the promise not to raise taxes on the middle-class.
Douglas Holtz-Eaken and Alex Brill have written an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal titled Another Obama Tax Hike: The Senate Health-Care Bill Would Raise Effective Marginal Tax Rates on Lower and Middle-Income Singles and Families up to 41%:
[The Senate health care bill raises] to shocking [...]

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Now that Democrats postponed the imposition of the luxury tax on the Cadillac insurance plans of labor union members, they are scammering to replace the lost revenues in order to keep their promise of deficit neutral healthcare reform.
Mike Godfrey of TaxNews.com reports that Congressional Democrats are considering the imposition of an additional tax on passive investment income:  �
Senior Congressional Democrats are exploring the option of [...]

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“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself changed in his bed into a giant cockroach.”
 - First line of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis -
Whoever coined the adage, “don’t tax me, don’t tax thee, tax the guy behind the tree,” knew whereof he spoke.�
WebCPA reports that President Obama and Congressional Democrats struck a back [...]

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President Obama and his Democrat buddies spent eight years criticizing the secretiveness of the Bush administration. Now, they’ll have a chance to put up or shut up.
(CueFinal Jeopardy Theme)
The House and Senate will be meeting to attempt a reconciliation of the differences between the healthcare reform bills passed by their respective chambers.
CBS News reports that CSPAN [...]

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The St. Petersburg Times has a column written by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber who claims that the tax on Cadillac insurance plans isn’t really a tax increase after all:
The assessment proposed in the Senate is not a new tax; it is the elimination of an existing tax break….
Under current law, if workers are paid in wages, [...]

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Ryan Ellis of Americans for Tax Reform has produced an excellent summary of the tax hikes included in the Senate healthcare plan which is expected to pass tomorrow:
Individual Mandate Tax (Page 324/Sec. 1501/$15 bil/Jan 2014): Starting in 2014, anyone not buying “qualifying” health insurance must pay an income surtax according to the higher of the [...]

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Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska yesterday agreed to vote for the Senate healthcare reform bill only if one of it’s provisions did not apply to his own state.
Here’s what William Jacobson of Le-gal In-sur-rec-tion says about the odorous deal:
While Nebraskans will get new Medicaid mandates covered by the federal government, most other states will sink under the [...]

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Kim Gieger of Tribune Newspapers says that the Senate has inserted a last minute provision in the healthcare bill that would replace the botax with a 10% sales tax on the use of tanning beds:
Representatives from the tanning industry see the new tax as an attempt by cosmetic surgeons to replace a proposed excise tax on [...]

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