Well, if anyone wanted the alleged housing bubble to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, they just found the guys with the pin: The President’s tax-advisory council is set to recommend limiting the tax deduction on mortgages — just as increased prices forced huge increases in the mortgages people have to pay to afford a home. Just as numbnutty, they are proposed to tax employer-paid health-insurance benefits — just as the cost of those benefits is skyrocketing. The commission was supposed to find a way to replace the revenue from the dreaded Alternative Minimum Tax, which is screwing more and more Americans every year. They didn’t stop screwing up. They just found another orifice.
Once again, this shows the utter lack of strategic vision from Bush. If he had balls and had any political capital left, he would have found a new tax strategy: flat-tax, value-added tax, simplified tax, something. Instead, he just found another way to piss off people.
