Charlie Rangel is an old-time Harlem Democrat. His slicked-back hair, dapper suits and pocket handkerchiefs recall the age of the 77-year-old congressman’s youth. But on Thursday October 25th the chairman of the tax-writing committee in the House of Representatives showed he had a modernizing side. Mr. Rangel proposed an overhaul of the American tax code that he claims would simplify the collection of taxes. The bill may not be the “mother of all tax reforms” as Mr. Rangel reckons. But neither is it entirely modest. It is unlikely to make it into law during the remainder of George Bush’s term as president, but it may set the terms of the debate after the election next year, especially if a Democrat is elected according to the Economist.
The main impetus for reform of America’s mammoth, complicated and costly tax code is the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). Conceived as a way of making sure that rich people did not find so many loopholes that they paid no tax at all, the AMT has begun to apply to more and more middle-income families. This is a problem for both Republican and Democrat lawmakers. For several years politicians have preferred a temporary fix rather than wholesale reform.
Mr Rangel’s bill would do away with the tax entirely—a costly change. To make up for it, he would raise taxes on couples making more than $200,000 a year. The other headline-grabbing revenue-raiser is a change in the way private-equity managers are taxed. Most of their income comes from “carried interest”, a share of a fund’s profits paid to partners, and is taxed at the capital-gains rate of 15%. This is proving too tempting for revenue-raisers, especially Democratic ones: the private-equity zillionaire paying a lower rate of tax than ordinary working folk. Under Mr. Rangel’s plan, carried interest would be taxed as income.
Read it here: America’s tax system: Rewriting the code