Tax-panel Will Consider Changing Mortgage Interest Deduction

This surprises me.  I didn't think mortgage interest and the capital gains provision on the sale of a home would be on the tax reform table.  But when the deficit problem is this big, and the projected changes in the alternative minimum tax open up an additional $1.2 trillion dollar budget gap, a $61.5 billion dollar deduction is a tempting source of revenue:

Tax Panel to Consider Modifying Mortgage-Interest Deduction, by David Streitfeld, LA Times: ...[D]ebate is starting among policymakers about reining in one of the most sacred cows of American public policy: the mortgage-interest deduction and other generous tax benefits granted to homeowners. A presidential commission on tax reform will take up the subject for the first time Tuesday. "Everything's on the table," said Charles Rossotti, a panel member... The mortgage-interest deduction saved homeowners $61.5 billion last year. No one expects the commission to recommend its elimination. Instead, the panel probably will consider scaling back the deduction for mortgage interest on second homes or home equity loans, and changing the deduction for property taxes, among other things. The stakes in such a discussion are huge. Changing the tax benefits for homeowners, even if done slowly, could cause short-term convulsions in the market as buyers recalculate what they could afford. ... Any proposed shift will encounter strong and possibly overwhelming resistance. But with a rising budget deficit, the prospects for change are much greater than they've ever been, say those involved in the debate. ... Eight years ago, capital gains taxes were eliminated for sellers who had profits of as much as $250,000 (for individuals) or $500,000 (for couples). ... Some policymakers and analysts are beginning to wonder whether such breaks are providing the wrong incentives, giving hefty deductions to millionaires buying Beverly Hills estates as well as to speculators snapping up Las Vegas ranch houses hoping to turn a quick profit... Bush specifically charged the panel to take account of "the importance of homeownership and charity in American society." That led many to conclude that the homeowner deductions were safe. ... But ... the mood changed over the summer. ... One reason for the shift: the expected demise of the alternative minimum tax. ... At a meeting in July, the nine panel members agreed unanimously to recommend eliminating the alternative minimum tax as an unfair and poorly designed parallel tax system. Because their mandate is to be revenue-neutral, that required them to come up with $1.2 trillion in other receipts over the next decade...

Comments

[anne]

Taking a moment to turn from the Paris fashion shows. Yummy :) The idea that there will be a reduction or elimination of the tax deduction for mortgage interest is beyond absurd. The party that supported this would be justly suicidal. When the President says no tax increases, this is the tax increase that would above all destroy Republican Congressional dominance. Back to fashion :) Good grief.

[Bruce Webb]

"Everything's on the table,"

Except changes in the top marginal rate on income.

It's the elephant in the room. People float a variety of schemes to cut the deficit, three of which are simple wishful thinking masking a real risk of political suicide.

One, substantially slash promised benefits for Social Security. I think I have said plenty on this topic.

Two, cut farm sudsidies. Well throw me in that briar patch. Good public policy coupled with sweeping Republican Senators from coast to coast out of office. Well a boy can dream. But sorry Big Sugar and Wheat State Senators are going to make sure that never happens.

Three, monkey with the interest deduction. What Anne said.

Willie Sutton famously explained that he robbed banks because "That was where the money was". Well we know where the money is today. And a return to Clinton era tax rates would be a fine way to tap it. A bunch of people got fabulously rich during the Clinton years and the boom started right after his tax increase. Whereas the Bush recession started right after his tax cut. Correlation does not equal causation but come on. With excuses to Anne "Everything's on the table My Ass"

[Bruce Webb]

"sudsidies"? What I get for having a red beer (hence 'suds') for breakfast .

But seriously a lot of this talk about cutting subsidies and the Cato shopping list of spending cuts is political nonsense. Ain't going to happen. Bush may imagine that he can just draw a line around the military budget, the Iraq war and tax rates for the upper 5% but that is only because he ran the last election he ever will run.

The Bushmobile is running on fumes. And more and more Republican passengers are looking at the gas gauge.

[Mark Sullivan]

It would be great if they would at least cap the mortgage subsidy so the wealthy didn't get a larger subsidy for spending more on housing. The way it works now is kind of as a housing consumption bonus.

Kind of a bad time for any politician to be adjusting the bricks at the bottom of the real-estate tower though. A lot of voters think that real estate can rise at ten to twenty percent a year forever. When that turns out not to be true, they are going to want to find someone or something to blame. They would almost certainly grandfather in existing homeowners anyway so it would be unlikely to raise much revenue.

[bailey]

As a homeless person (renter since we sold early this year) & a recent convert to the Supreme Bush doctrine, "It's my right as a god-fearing American to set humongously costly & absurd policy & MAKE someone other than the super-rich pay for it", I think it's a great idea. It's only purpose was to encourage home buying, and that's hardly needed now. My only caveat is that Congress put a repeal provision in the Bill that I alone can trigger when we buy again!

[anne]

Bruce Webb

Wonderful :)

[anne]

Mark is a dear, but really he fails to understand. Where oh where is the recession :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/fashion/thursdaystyles/06handbags.html?ex=1286251200&en=0b3ac4d64b814000&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

October 6, 2005

Over the Shoulder, Over the Top
By RUTH LA FERLA

How did this happen?" Nina Collins asked as she settled down to a lunch of miso soup and salad in downtown Manhattan last week. "When did we get to this place where we spend $1,000 on a bag?"

The question was rhetorical. Not long ago Ms. Collins herself arrived at that place, succumbing, she confided a bit sheepishly, to a yen for a handbag styled like a saddle bag from Mulberry, a British luxury brand in high demand at stores like Barneys New York and Bergdorf Goodman. The price, about $1,200, struck her as an affront to reason. But she had to have it.

In buying the handbag Ms. Collins, a literary agent, joined an ever widening circle of status-driven, selectively acquisitive consumers whose purchasing habits have buoyed the luxury market this year - steeper gas prices, inflation and a weakened dollar be damned. A sense of optimism, which industry executives and analysts say is being fueled by a strong stock market and a desire to trade up without regard to price hikes of 20 to 35 percent over a year ago, has propelled shoppers to stores in ever greater numbers.

In their pursuit of the season's most coveted bags, many are giving common sense the slip, parting with, say, $975 for a best seller like the Marc Jacobs Sofia bag, which which last fall commanded $895, or $1,445 for a leather Prada "bowler" bag that, a few seasons back, cost $940 or $990 for similar models. Shoppers' infatuation with handbags has lent that category significant clout, to the point, retailers and industry analysts say, that bags have supplanted shoes, jeans and even jewelry as consumers' choice signifier of affluence, social standing and hipness. Never mind that some models, in the battered and fringed styles now popular, look as though they belonged to a tramp.

"It seems that each year what we're seeing in the women's fashion luxury market there has been a migration from one category to the next," said Marshal Cohen, the chief retail analyst for the NPD Group, a market research firm in Port Washington, N.Y. "A few years ago it was shoes. Last year it was jeans. This is the year of the handbag." ...

[anne]

Oops, that was meant to be a recession, what recession, comment, but it will do as well for who needs taxes anyway comment :) By the way, the Senate just approved another 50 billion dollars for the war effort. Then, you wonder why I look to birds.

[Mark Thoma]

anne, I'm confused - I've never said there was a recession or called one - but in any case you have more than earned the right to disagree!

There's a second part to that. They also planned to cut exactly the same amount (in the House version), 50 billion, from entitlements...

Did you see this:
Wilson's Mark on Black Culture Remembered, by Ramesh Santanam, AP: Admirers of playwright August Wilson vowed Saturday at his funeral to ensure that future generations are exposed to Wilson's tales of black struggle in 20th century America. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Wilson died ... Oct. 1 in Seattle. He was 60. "You will not be a footnote in American history. We guarantee the young kids will know who August Wilson is," Kenny Leon, artistic director for the True Colors Theater Company in Atlanta, told several hundred dignitaries, theater celebrities and others who gathered for the service at the Soldiers and Sailors National Military Museum and Memorial. ... The funeral was held in Wilson's hometown of Pittsburgh, the setting for nine plays in his epic 10-play cycle that explored black America. The series included such dramas as "Fences," "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and "The Piano Lesson," which starred veteran stage, TV and movie actor Charles S. Dutton. "When I read 'The Piano Lesson,' I realized it encompassed the entire African-American experience," Dutton said after the funeral. "August Wilson's legacy is as important as Martin Luther King's legacy, as important as Malcolm X's legacy and as important as Nat Turner." During the funeral, jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis played "Danny Boy," moving the audience to tears. Minutes later, he broke into a jazzier, upbeat number, bringing people to their feet to dance, clap and tap their shoes to the beat. Actors Dutton, Phylicia Rashad, Anthony Chisholm and Ruben Santiago-Hudson read passages from four of Wilson's plays. "Death ain't nothing but a fastball on the outside corner, and you know what I'll do to that," Dutton said, reading from "Fences."

[anne]

Notice guys, the not so subtle suggestion here for a holiday gift. Hmmm :)

[anne]

Oh Mark, I was playing, but you are a dear and noting August Wilson is deservedly wonderful. There is song :)

[Mark Thoma]

The year of guys with a clue about gifts? Never gonna happen...

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/theater/theaterspecial/03era.html?ex=1128571200&en=151c9c4cc41968e7&ei=5070

February 2, 2003

The Mother of an Era: August Wilson's
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

ON a stifling July night in 1982, an aspiring playwright named August Wilson sat in the airless barn that served as the main stage for the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn. Nearing 40, he had lately been earning his living as the staff cook for a social service agency in Minnesota. Beside him perched his mother, who had never seen any of his efforts at drama performed. This one was called "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom."

A few rows away, Lloyd Richards gingerly settled into his customary chair. Though respected as the leader of both the O'Neill Center and the Yale Repertory Theater, he had gone almost a quarter-century since his zenith as a director -- with Lorraine Hansberry's "Raisin in the Sun." Portly and gray, he was deep enough into middle age to have bad hips.

Down beneath the stage, in what had been a livestock pen, several actors paced, scripts in hand. One was a former dry-cleaner, another a songwriter, the third a convicted killer who had entered the Yale Drama School while on parole. That young man, Charles S. Dutton, had been considering passing on the O'Neill because it paid only $25 a week, except that Mr. Richards had told him in an oracular way, "We might have something there for you."

By the final blackout four hours later, American theater had changed forever. The point is not simply that the staged reading of "Ma Rainey" led to the acclaimed 1984 production that marked Mr. Wilson's Broadway debut. It is not that "Ma Rainey" announced Mr. Dutton to the theatergoing world and that it proclaimed Mr. Richards's re-emergence as a discoverer and shaper of dramatic talent. With the benefit of 20 years of hindsight, one can posit that the maiden performance of "Ma Rainey" inaugurated the August Wilson era. As both an individual playwright and a hub of theatrical activity, he has defined his time in the way Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, Neil Simon and Edward Albee defined the three preceding generations.

The revival of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" that opens on Thursday at the Royale Theater -- starring Mr. Dutton and Whoopi Goldberg and directed by Marion McClinton -- invites retrospection. The production arrives with a modest advance, some public friction between stars and producers, and a sense of Mr. Wilson's career coming full circle.

The playwright has already completed the ninth in his 10-play cycle about African-American life in the 20th century; that drama, "Gem of the Ocean," will have its premiere in April at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. An unrepentant black nationalist, a self-described "race man" who likens crossover artists to slaves amusing master, Mr. Wilson has managed simultaneously to ignore the mainstream and to stake his place in it. For its effect on American culture at large, Mr. Wilson's work finds its closest parallels not in theater but in music -- gospel, jazz, even hip-hop.

"There's a concept in theology called the 'scandal of particularity,' meaning when the universal God becomes a particular Jewish guy named Jesus," said Michael Eric Dyson, a prominent cultural critic who is a professor of African-American studies and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. "August Wilson's scandal of particularity is his unyielding attention to the specific details of black life. What it means for black identity to be assaulted, but also elevated. Assaulted by racial oppression, economic misery. But elevated because, in his plays, moral vision is not the property of the elite. There's ethical wisdom in the everyday struggles of black people. August Wilson has no desire to translate this for whites, to give a grammar of explanation or a thesaurus that might illumine. Just put black life there onstage and assume it exists. And yet by doing that, people can tap into it and it can resonate universally, because it dares to be particular."

Certainly, no playwright of Mr. Wilson's generation -- he is 57 -- has proved as ubiquitous. Every one of his first eight dramas has played in New York, seven of them on Broadway, and collectively they have received nearly 2,000 productions, from amateur companies to regional theaters to London's Royal National Theater. Mr. Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes ("Fences" in 1988 and "The Piano Lesson" in 1990), been a Pulitzer finalist four other times ("The Piano Lesson" in 1989, "Two Trains Running" in 1992, "Seven Guitars" in 1995 and "King Hedley II" in 2000), and taken seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards (for all his plays except "King Hedley"). The search-engine Google makes 17,000 hits for "August Wilson": study guides, video clips, homework tips, discographies, selected quotations. The Library of Congress lists 30 books by or about Mr. Wilson. Doctoral dissertations on his plays ponder such topics as "strategies of coping with social oppression," "power acquisition theory and the tragic legacy," and "reforming the black male self."

The object of such postmodern rhetoric was born in the industrial reality of Pittsburgh in 1945. By now, the rudiments of Mr. Wilson's biography are widely known -- the son of a resilient, principled black mother and an abusive, absentee white father; the bright student driven into dropping out by bigoted teachers and classmates; the young poet inspired by the black arts movement in the 1960's; the nascent playwright who found his voice and subject only after leaving his black neighborhood, the Hill, for the vanilla climes of Minnesota.

Figuratively, and often literally, Mr. Wilson's plays have taken audiences to the Hill and the joys and torments of the black working class. Jitney drivers, preachers, railroad porters and boardinghouse landladies populate his stage. While slavery and its legacy hover over every Wilson drama, whites themselves rarely appear. His plays admit white viewers to a wholly contained black world of lunch-counter banter and bid-whist games, and reawaken blacks to the memories of thriving communal life before the mixed blessing of integration.

A strong strain of traditionalism runs through Mr. Wilson's art, and it helps explain the work's accessibility across racial lines. Even as Mr. Wilson's plays freely incorporate African-American art and ritual -- the ring shout in "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," the blues songs in "Ma Rainey," the totemic carvings in "The Piano Lesson" -- they embrace the now-unfashionable conventions of linear narrative and dramatic tension....

[Mark Thoma]

I see now, on the "where is the recession," boy am I dense. Remember, subtlety is lost on guys. Hit them on the head with a handbag if you want action.

[anne]

Thinking of post after post, I must note that argue though I may with nuances, I am far more worried than not about what we are about and where we are led or directed. Birds and art however are always there of course when we worry.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/10/theater/theaterspecial/03play.html?ex=1128571200&en=f42b06110a132994&ei=5070

March 10, 1991

How to Write A Play Like August Wilson
By AUGUST WILSON

When I discovered the word breakfast, and I discovered that it was two words, I think then I decided I wanted to be a writer. I've been writing since April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter, for $20. That's, I don't know, 26 years now. And so, behind each one of the plays are all those thousands of poems and stories and things I wrote many, many years ago. I had begun writing then as a 20-year-old poet. And I don't care what anybody says, as a 20-year-old poet you cannot sit at home and write poetry, because you don't know anything about life. So you have to go out and engage the world.

My friends at the time were painters. I was not envious of them, because they were always trying to get money for paint and get money for canvas. I felt that my tools were very simple. I could borrow a pencil and write on a napkin or get a piece of paper from anyone. So I began to write out in bars and restaurants little snatches of things.

I still do it that way. I start -- generally I have an idea of something I want to say -- but I start with a line of dialogue. I have no idea half the time who's speaking or what they're saying. I'll start with the line, and the more dialogue I write, the better I get to know the characters. For instance, in writing the play "The Piano Lesson," one of the characters, Berniece, says something to Boy Willie, her brother, and he talks about how "Sutter fell in the well." Well this is a surprise to me . I didn't know that.

Then I say, "Well, who is Sutter?" You see, if you have a character in a play, the character who knows everything, then you won't have any problem. Whenever you get stuck you ask them a question. I have learned that if you trust them and simply do not even think about what they're saying, it doesn't matter. They say things like, "Sutter fell in the well." You just write it down and make it all make sense later. So I use those characters a lot. Anything you want to know you ask the characters.

Part of my process is that I assemble all these things and later try to make sense out of them and sort of plug them in to what is my larger artistic agenda. That agenda is answering James Baldwin when he called for "a profound articulation of the black tradition," which he defined as "that field of manners and ritual of intercourse that will sustain a man once he's left his father's house."

So I say, O.K., that field of manners and ritual of intercourse is what I'm trying to put on stage. And I best learn about that through the blues. I discovered everything there. So I have an agenda. Someone asked the painter Romare Bearden about his work and he said, "I try to explore, in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common to all cultures."

So I say, O.K., culture and the commonalities of culture.

Using those two things and having the larger agenda, I take all this material, no matter what it is, and later, I sit down and assemble it. And I discovered -- and I admire Romare Bearden a lot; he's a collagist, he pieces things together -- I discovered that that's part of my process, what I do. I piece it all together, and, hopefully, have it make sense, the way a collage would.

As for the characters, they are all invented. At the same time they are all made up out of myself. So they're all me, different aspects of my personality, I guess. But I don't say, "Oh, I know a guy like this. I'm going to write Joe." Some people do that. I can't do that. So I write different parts of myself and I try to invent or discover some other parts.

I approach poetry and plays differently. For me, if there is such a thing as public art and private art, then the poems are private. They are a record, a private journey, if you will. I count them as moments of privilege. I count them as gifts....

[anne]

My gift :)

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CEEDA173EF935A15753C1A9659C8B63

October 26, 2003

The Fortress of Monoglot Nation
By Margo Jefferson

''There is no Frigate like a book / To take us Lands away,'' wrote Emily Dickinson. But the ship most American readers sail remains strictly within national borders. According to a recent Publishers Weekly article, of all the books translated worldwide, only 6 percent (maybe less) are translated from other languages into English. By contrast, almost 50 percent are translated from English into those other languages. We all know that events of global importance take place outside our linguistic borders every day. And since our educational system is famous for how poorly it teaches foreign languages, it might try to compensate by offering students a lot more books in translation.

What sets off one's desire to read a foreign writer? Some odd personal urge: a country that has always intrigued you; a piece of history that starts to. Intense political change can have a trickle-down effect on our reading, though it doesn't always. A Greek journalist friend still recalls his shock at coming to New York the year Germany decided to reunite. He went through several large bookstores in search of books on German history and was nonplused to find just one. Had he wished to write about Richard M. Nixon, he would have had his pick of 20.

In a 1957 essay, Doris Lessing wrote: ''We are all of us made kin with each other and with everything in the world because of the kinship of possible destruction.'' Now, thanks to technology, we have the visual kinship of watching wars break out all over the world. How do these places become more than masses of facts and photographs, nations that are designated allies or threats, objects of our pity or disdain? Reading the literature of these countries is a good way to start.

Last spring I spent eight days in Russia and Finland. I prepared by doing some reading. I've done even more since I came back.

''Not Before Sundown'' (translated by Herbert Lomas) is a wily thriller-fantasy by a Finnish novelist and comic strip artist, Johanna Sinisalo. Her narrators are young Helsinki residents, chief among them Angel, an insouciant gay photographer, and Palomita, a frightened mail order bride from the Philippines. When eros and violence threaten to erupt, the chief suspect is a troll Angel found in his alley and took in. Trolls do exist outside of ''Peer Gynt.'' According to the book, anyway, biologists declared them a species in 1907. Not long after, several Finnish ''Satan sects'' declared them demons come back to earth. Sinisalo frames her tale with Angel's frantic Web researches into troll lore. Each discovery sounds like the voice of a storyteller reminding us of how the gods play with our fates.

Russia led me to the much-admired Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis. His brilliance (and that of his translator, Duska Mikic-Mitchell) did the rest. I'd been meaning to read Kis for years; he first came to the attention of American critics and scholars in the 1970's along with Milan Kundera and other Eastern Europeans....

[Lord]

It would be poison bait but the Republicans might be willing at a certain level since it could be highly directed towards the blue states. (The second home deduction is for congress and therefore sacrosanct. )