21st Century Essential Guide to Federal Tax Reform, Report of the Mack-Breaux Bipartisan Presidents Advisory Panel on Tax Reform (CD-ROM) (CD-ROM)

Product Description
This electronic book on CD-ROM provides a comprehensive collection of documents about the work of the bipartisan President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform, chaired by Connie Mack III, with John Breaux serving as Vice-Chairman, and panel member William Frenzel, Elizabeth Garrett, Edward Lazear, Timothy Muris, James Poterba, Charles Rossotti, and Liz Ann Sonders. The panel issued its final report, contained in this collection, in late 2005. The report is entitled: Simple, Fair, and Pro-Growth: Proposals to Fix America’s Tax System. The report states: President George W. Bush formed this Panel to identify the major problems in our nation’s tax code and to recommend options to make the code simpler, fairer, and more conducive to economic growth. The Panel heard from nearly 100 witnesses and received thousands of written comments. Together, these witnesses and these comments described the unacceptable state of our current tax system. Yet this tax code governs virtually every transaction in the world’s largest economy, affecting the daily lives of nearly 300 million people. Our tax code is rewritten so often that it should be drafted in pencil. Each year, the tax code is adjusted to meet multiple policy goals – some are broadly shared, but many are not. Myriad tax deductions, credits, exemptions, and other preferences may be a practical way to get policy enacted, but it is a poor way to write a tax code. Whether the government spends more or extends a special tax break, the effect is the same: everyone else must pay higher taxes to raise the revenue necessary to run the government. During the past few decades, panels have been formed repeatedly, legislation introduced annually, and hearings scheduled regularly to study our tax code and recommend changes. In 1986, a bipartisan effort yielded the last major tax reform legislation. But because of the ever-present tendency to tinker with the tax code, we must redouble our efforts to achieve fundamental reform. Since the 1986 tax reform bill passed, there have been nearly 15,000 changes to the tax code – equal to more than two changes a day. Each one of these changes had a sponsor, and each had a rationale to defend it. Each one was passed by Congress and signed into law. Some of us saw this firsthand, having served in the U.S. Congress for a combined 71 years, including 36 years on the tax-writing committees. Others of us saw the changes from a different perspective – teaching, interpreting, and even administering the tax code. In retrospect, it is clear that frequent changes to the tax code, no matter how well-intentioned, ultimately undermine the integrity of the code in real and significant ways. We unanimously recommend two options to reform the tax code. We refer to one option as the Simplified Income Tax Plan and the other option as the Growth and Investment Tax Plan. Both of them are preferable to our current system. Both satisfy the President’s directive to recommend options that are simple, fair, and progrowth. The Simplified Income Tax Plan dramatically simplifies our tax code, cleans out targeted tax breaks that have cluttered the system, and lowers rates. It does away with gimmicks and hidden traps like the alternative minimum tax. It preserves and simplifies major features of our current tax code, including benefits for home ownership, charitable giving, and health care, and makes them available to all Americans. It removes many of the disincentives to saving that exist in our current code, and it makes small business tax calculations much easier. It also offers an updated corporate tax structure to make it easier for American corporations to compete in global markets. The second recommended option, the Growth and Investment Tax Plan builds on the Simplified Income Tax Plan and adds a major new feature: moving the tax code closer to a system that would not tax families or businesses on their savings or investments.

About the Author
Our CD-ROMs are designed to provide a convenient user-friendly reference work, utilizing the benefits of the Acrobat format to uniformly present thousands of pages that can be rapidly reviewed or printed without untold hours of tedious searching and downloading. Vast archives of important public domain government information that might otherwise remain inaccessible are available for instant review no matter where you are. This book-on-a-disc makes a great reference work and educational tool.

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