Republican leaders on Monday killed a Senate plan to close a loophole allowing small-business owners to deduct up to $100,000 from their taxable income for buying a luxury sport utility vehicle.
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Republican Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma offered the proposal to drop the tax break for doctors, lawyers, real estate agents and other business owners who buy expensive SUVs. "There is enormous abuse of this provision. People are driving SUVs through this loophole," Nickles said.
The deduction of up to $100,000 from taxable income dramatically cut the price of a Hummer H2, Land Rover and other expensive, gas-guzzling SUVs for small business owners in the highest tax bracket.
The loophole was part of the $350 billion Bush tax cut enacted in May and applied to the purchase of a vehicle for business use weighing 6,000 pounds or more.
Having fought two wars on the US taxpayers' credit card for the sake of the terror-financing Saudi and Kuwaiti monarchies, by now it should be clear that the Bush family's interest in energy independence is less than nil. Therefore, only the most obscenely and ostentatiously wasteful vehicles will qualify for the tax loophole.
These are not oversights in a 1,100-page pile of "policy." This is only the latest volley in a deliberate, coordinated and unconscionable attack on America. The so-called War on Terror is in effect a war on American energy independence, a war on American taxpayers, a war on American democracy, and, most of all, a war on reason itself.
This post from August 2003 spells out the original luxury SUV loophole, as written up in Kiplinger's personal finance magazine.
