"Experts" whine about Obama tax plan, shrug off corporate tax cheats

Is this story one from the Department of Hypocrisy Department or what?

Presidential frontrunner Barack Obama has announced part of his tax plan: If you're a senior citizen who makes less than $50,000 a year, you'll pay no income tax. But that's not the hypocritical part of this story.

His tax plan is workable, and it sounds fair to me. But not to the Washington intelligentsia (to use the term loosely).

They call it a subsidy to seniors. Um, what??? How is poor and middle-income seniors not having to pay income tax a subsidy? If seniors were getting so many subsidies, they'd be able to retire instead of having to keep working at the age that their parents retired.

And if they're not still working, they're probably on a fixed income. So how is that an advantage? It isn't.

Meanwhile, however, the self-styled "experts" completely laugh off the near-total immunity that corporations have from taxes.

The Government Accountability Office (Congress's investigative arm) says that most American corporations haven't paid one penny in federal income taxes since at least 1998. Not a cent. Nor do most foreign corporations that do business in America.

According to the GAO's report, two-thirds of American corporations paid no income taxes between 1998 and 2005.

So while the stink tanks complain about poor and middle-income senior citizens getting a tax break, I guess it's fine with them if corporations that rake in billions a year have gotten an even larger tax break for a decade.

I guess they believe in Leona Helmsley's dictum that "only the little people pay taxes."

(Source: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080811/D92GAVIO0.html;
http://www.newsnet5.com/money/17165868/detail.html)