taxes

John McCain sketched out his economic agenda in an address at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University.

McCain's speech reads like an attempt to unify a divided party by offering every faction something to make them happy. For the GOP's supply-siders and business interests, there are promises to extend the Bush tax cuts and slash corporate rates. For moderate Republicans clinging to seats in Democratic states, there's a pledge to cut the Alternative Minimum Tax, which hits upper-middle class Blue Staters hardest. For free traders, there's a shout-out to the Colombian Free Trade Agreement; for flat-tax obsessives, there's a call for an alternative tax-filing option, featuring just two brackets instead of four or five. For deficit hawks and porkbusters, there's a promise to veto any bill with earmarks, an attack on corporate welfare, and a call for a one-year freeze in discretionary spending and a top-to-bottom review of every agency's budget. For entitlement reformers, there's a call to means-test the prescription drugs benefit. There's even something for the small band of conservatives (this writer among them) who have been agitating for a distinctively pro-family economic agenda, in the form of a pledge to double the tax exemption for dependents, from $3500 to $7000.

European governments have begun a search for tax-evaders sheltering funds in Liechtenstein.

Since Germany revealed that it had bought, for $5 million, the names of 1400 tax evaders sheltering income in Liechtenstein, the hunt has been on for tax evaders on both sides of the Atlantic.  The thing has all the ingredients of a reasonably entertaining caper film.  A disgruntled ex-employee seeking to use confidential banking records as a bargaining chip against the government of Liechtenstein.  Secret databases passed from government to government.  Wealthy scofflaws scrambling for cover.
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