Indeed if the limit on preferences and deductions were set low enough, it might well be possible to allow anyone to take a certain amount of capital gains or dividends at a zero tax rate and still increase revenues, if it were within the same low fixed dollar limit.
At fault is the fact that the standardized deduction for married couples is set to increase sharply.
The limitation on itemized deductions would be set at $250,000 and $300,000 respectively.
And since research shows people rarely change their 401(k) deductions once they're set, it's likely that those encouraged to make a bigger deduction when they're hired will do so throughout their tenure at that company, Professor Hershfield added.
Aimed at the middle class, it limits the value-added tax (VAT) deductions that can be set against income tax.
"By granting the full deduction for money simply being set aside, the government is telling donors that they need not do anything else," Madoff says.
The mortgage-interest deduction is also set to be more limited, which may speak to a broader GOP belief that "personal interest or non-business interest is not supposed to be deductible," Duke law professor Lawrence A. Zelenak, an expert in tax policy, told me.
This practice can be explained, however, by assuming that credit-card borrowing is the result of (largely) irrational impulse spending, while the retirement saving deductions are assumed to have been set up by the cool-headed, rational side of the consumer's nature.
If just deductions of countable length are admitted, then no deductive apparatus for L ω1,ω) can be set up which is adequate for deductions from arbitrary sets of premises, that is, for which (2.1) would hold for every set Δ ⊆ Sent ω1,ω), regardless of cardinality.
