55 tax breaks worth $50 billion expire

I think this is a good thing. These are basically either giveaways to special interests or (perhaps) well-intentioned but misguided attempts to reward "good" behavior with tax breaks (and thereby complicate the tax code and provide opportunities to "game the system"). Letting them expire will bring in $50 billion more in revenue, decreasing the deficit by that amount.



(Caveat: Congress might yet extend them. Harry Reid wants to extend at least some of them, but hasn't been able to yet.)



From NASCAR to wind power: Congress just let 55 tax breaks expire

Quote:

This is becoming an annual tradition of sorts. Every year, there are a raft of "temporary" tax breaks, credits, and deductions that expire on Dec. 31. Lawmakers usually plan on extending them. But they don't always get to it on time.

One of the big ones:

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5) Gone: A $9 billion "sop for Wall Street banks and major multinationals" Multinational corporations in the United States also lost a key tax break: The “Extension of the Active Financing Exception to Subpart F.” Sounds dull, right? It's not. As my colleague Dan Eggen reported a few years ago, this provision, first created in 1997, allows manufacturers and banks to defer taxes when they engage in a special type of financial transactions known as "active financing." The break now costs $9 billion per year, and critics claim it encourages firms to create jobs overseas. But it's a top lobbying priority for companies like GE and JP Morgan, who say that it helps them compete abroad. Cost to extend: About $9 billion per year.

Now, maybe you can find a few in there that you agree with (like teachers who buy school supplies with their own money, which accounts for a very small amount of the total) but overall, I think it's better to have a simpler tax code without a million tax breaks for every conceivable thing under the sun.

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