Not Foreclosure Prevention Act

The Senate legislation called the Foreclosure Prevention Act is chock full of tax breaks for builders and automakers (oh, and airlines too because their lobbyist was on the ball).   

From the Dallas Morning News:      

In the Senate bill, the nation's biggest homebuilders, some on the verge of bankruptcy, won a provision that would let them claim millions in tax refunds by charging their current losses against the huge profits they made three or four years ago.  Other struggling industries would also benefit.   

Ford and General Motors were especially dogged in securing a tax break that would let them collect up to $40 million each in alternative minimum tax credits that would otherwise be out of reach because they did not pay enough taxes in recent years to claim a rebate.

Admire for a moment the symmetrical twilight zone-like connection here .  Sprawl developers and their enablers and codependents might be viewed as the ones largely to blame for this whole, you know, recession thing. The last 25 years of growth was financed like a house of cards.   

They overbuilt the land scraping, watershed-raping, automobile dependent, air polluting, public resource sucking (but highly profitable) sprawl we know and love today.  The Senate proposes to reward them again for this.

(modified at 10:13am because, so help me,  I don't have an editor.)

Comments

[Hunter]

If Congress wants to reinstate income averaging, then they should call it for what it is and make it available to everyone. For example, laid off workers who are forced into higher tax brackets due to severance payments and the following year have no income other than unemployment compensation.