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Quinn endorses Laesch

Perhaps he can figure out why Laesch is so against the AMT–everyone is for changing the AMT–Laesch wants to get rid of it according to his Tribune interview.   Even for people making over $1 million a year. Seriously.

Why?  The problem with the tax isn’t that it’s innately unfair, it’s that it hasn’t kept up with inflation and hits a lot of families in middle incomes.

36:50
CT: I’d just like to ask each of you if you would favor making the Bush tax cuts permanent. And, if so, why? If not, why? And also, what you would do … the Democrats in Congress attempted to do a PAYGO, one-year fix of the Alternative Minimum Tax, a $50 million fix. And they kind of [or, "finally"?] gave it up.  They fixed it, but they haven’t figured out a way to pay for it, and that violated their PAYGO pledge.
So, I’d like to know what you think about that, and what you would have done differently. Mr. Laesch, we’ll start with you.  So, Bush tax cuts and AMT tax.

JL: (starts on Bush tax cuts)
37:50
So, it’s probably a temporary Band-Aid on the Alternate [sic] Minimum Tax. But, some sort of inflation indexing. I didn’t look at my questionnaire when we pulled this out, and I realized I didn’t answer that question when I was coming up here. … [inaudible] …
But, there has to be some sort of temporary fix of the Alternate Minimum Tax.

CT: Well, they’ve been doing one-year fixes every year since 2003.

JL: JL: Well, the long-term goal is to get rid of that.  I don’t think that it worked.  IS THAT A FAIR STATEMENT?[inaudible/trailed off].

CT: They estimate it’ll cost a trillion dollars to get rid of the Alternative Minimum Tax, because its assumptions have been built into all revenue projections going forward. So, just eliminating it would take a trillion dollars out of projected revenues. So, um …

38:50
JL: But, what I said is, that’s the long-term goal. If we stabilize the economy, and get more people back to work with good-paying jobs, there’s gonna be more tax revenue to use. So that’s the goal here over five to ten years, that the Congress is gonna have to deal with.

[Break – discussing job creation]

40:15
CT: On the AMT, the Democrats wanted to pay for that one-year patch, and they finally gave up and passed it and didn’t pay for it. What’s your take on that, and what would you have done differently?

JL: [talks about foreign policy and committees]

41:15 I would also listen to the things voters in the 14th are concerned about. And I understand there’s a huge disparity in the concentration of wealth. Geneva-St. Charles area is very affluent, the area of the district, but the further west you go, there’s more and more people who are struggling from job losses, especially as you get out to Whiteside County, where they lost the steel mill, and a number of other places … Caterpillar, [inaudible – Aurora?], those places are all –-.  Yeah, those are the people I will listen to and consider, and in tax policy, what’s going to help those people most.

41:50 I think just the short-term patch is an inflation index, indexing for inflation … with respect to the AMT, and the long-term goal should be to get rid of it.

WTF is he talking about… and perhaps Quinn could explain the problem to him.