re: #70 allegro

Talking about the deductions sounds great in the abstract until you start looking at the numbers involved. Everyone on both sides of the aisle consider charitable deductions to be a good thing - encouraging charitable giving. Reduce that deduction, even if limited to high income earners, would hurt charitable giving to a wide range of entities - university endowments, health care and medical research (think cancer, diabetes, MS, etc.), disaster aid, etc.

So, if you take charitable giving off the table, that leaves items like the mortgage interest deduction and the state tax deductions. And both have pretty strong constituencies supporting them too (bipartisan at that) - and since the real estate markets have been among the hardest hit sectors, limiting the mortgage interest deduction is seen as hurting that recovery.

Thing is that if you want to gain revenue by eliminating deductions, credits, etc., alone, the best way IMO would be to revise the AMT and not only finally peg it to the CPI (as done with other taxes so we don’t have to do the inane fight every year), but it can be simplified and folded into the general tax rates as a new rate bracket - make it your 39.6% bracket for say over $500k and have limited deductions.