Club President Chris Chocola in the WSJ: End The Tax Extenders
Club for Growth President Chris Chocola has an OpEd in the Wall Street Journal this morning on ending the tax extenders:
A $250-a-year subsidy for those who commute to work using New York’s “bike share” program. Breaks for Broadway plays like “Of Mice and Men” starring James Franco and Chris O’Dowd, up to $15 million per production. A $71 million benefit for Nascar facilities. Billions in credits for the wind-energy industry.
All that and more, coming soon to a taxpayer near you. It’s once again time for the annual special-interest orgy known as the “tax extender” legislation, a giveaway bill that Congress plans to take up in the coming weeks.
Since the 1980s, when Washington last enacted comprehensive tax reform, Congress has passed extensions of ostensibly “temporary” tax breaks for interest groups. The package is referred to as “tax extenders” because the breaks are almost always extended by Congress without much opposition. The 2014 installment could cost $85 billion in the next two years, and legislators are piling on their pet projects since it’s considered “must pass” legislation.
This is all a mistake. Congress needs to clean up the tax code and lower marginal rates across the board, but tax-extender legislation delays any serious reform. Congress should let the extenders expire permanently, and the Club for Growth, the free-market organization I run, intends to oppose the package. If a vote occurs, we’ll likely include it on our annual congressional scorecard, which goes out to more than 100,000 of our members.
Click here to read the whole thing.