Tax Pledges Lose Allure as Eyes Turn to Reform
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
NYT
WASHINGTON — Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah has signed a pledge never to raise taxes. He signed another pledge too, one that made it nearly impossible to vote for a bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. But right before that vote over the summer, in a meeting with scores of his Republican colleagues, he stood up and proclaimed that he would never sign another pledge.
While some pledges, like marriage vows, may always carry weight, strict antitax pledges may be losing some of their sheen.
On Tuesday, Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, took to the House floor for a rare excoriation of the antitax activist Grover G. Norquist and his strictly worded pledge, which has been signed by almost the entire Republican caucus as well as a few Democrats. A day later, Senator John Thune of South Dakota suggested that antitax pledges ought to be revisited, because they can be interpreted too broadly in closing loopholes or eliminating tax deductions. “We shouldn’t be bound by something that could be interpreted different ways if what we’re trying to accomplish is broad-based tax reform,” he said.
These events, and interviews with lawmakers, suggest that antitax pledges are beginning to worry lawmakers, fund-raisers and others because of fears that they hamstring efforts to rewrite the nation’s tax code — a task viewed as a necessity by many on both sides of the aisle and the Rotunda.
(More here.)
NYT
WASHINGTON — Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah has signed a pledge never to raise taxes. He signed another pledge too, one that made it nearly impossible to vote for a bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. But right before that vote over the summer, in a meeting with scores of his Republican colleagues, he stood up and proclaimed that he would never sign another pledge.
While some pledges, like marriage vows, may always carry weight, strict antitax pledges may be losing some of their sheen.
On Tuesday, Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, took to the House floor for a rare excoriation of the antitax activist Grover G. Norquist and his strictly worded pledge, which has been signed by almost the entire Republican caucus as well as a few Democrats. A day later, Senator John Thune of South Dakota suggested that antitax pledges ought to be revisited, because they can be interpreted too broadly in closing loopholes or eliminating tax deductions. “We shouldn’t be bound by something that could be interpreted different ways if what we’re trying to accomplish is broad-based tax reform,” he said.
These events, and interviews with lawmakers, suggest that antitax pledges are beginning to worry lawmakers, fund-raisers and others because of fears that they hamstring efforts to rewrite the nation’s tax code — a task viewed as a necessity by many on both sides of the aisle and the Rotunda.
(More here.)
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