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Thursday, February 14, 2008
DAILY FISCAL POLICY REVIEW -- 02-14-08
Budget -- Down on the Farm: House Agriculture Chair Collin Peterson (D-MN) and the panel's ranking member, Robert W. Goodlatte (R-VA) have sent to conference a farm bill that cuts out commodity price supports for such crops corn, wheat and rice in the ninth year of the bill's ten-year provisions... Farmers who earn more than $900,000 a year and make most of their income from farming would be ineligible for farm payments... The White House praised the bill but Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) recommended it be "thrown in the trash barrel."
Taxes -- Makes you Long for Carried Interest: Senate Finance Committee tax counsel Ellen McCarthy said yesterday that a bill introduced last year to tax as corporations all publicly traded partnerships deriving income from investment adviser or asset management services is a "live issue" in an environment where revenue raisers are scarce and that there is "bipartisan support in the Senate"... As we noted last fall, "estimates put 10-year revenue figures for the carried interest proposal somewhere in the $50 billion ballpark while PTP reform is thought to add a small fraction of that figure." Small fraction is charitable: JCT puts 10-year revenues from PTP in the $1 billion ballpark.
Earmarks -- The Color of Pork: CQ has analyzed the distribution of pork to members of Congress on partisan, racial, and gender bases and finds that "Black and Hispanic lawmakers in the House lag significantly behind their white counterparts in the distribution of appropriations earmarks" by a roughly 2-to-1 ratio... The analysis covers $18.3 billion allotted to 12,881 projects during the FY08 budget process... By another measure, minorities faired well: three of the five top-ranked earmark recipients in the House were white male GOP members; in the Senate, that figure was four out of five.
Posted by Dana Chasin
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