He also raised taxes on Overseas Americans. The provisions for exemptions of American citizens living overseas had major changes, housing is no longer an allowed deduction and a bunch of other stuff. We are still trying to get a handle on all that happened.

Republicans are NOT the party of small Government.

Republicans do NOT want to reduce taxes.

What Republicans want to do is to transfer money from the American people to the people who helped them get elected.

Teenagers saving for college? Shouldn't their rich parents just be able to write that check to Harvard?

  This isn't an accident.

 A young person who can afford college is a young person who can't be shipped off to Iraq.

  The Republicans have -- stealthily -- made it harder and harder every year for families to be able to afford college. They'd been hoping Americans wouldn't notice -- and by and large, they haven't.

  But this one's too obvious. This one could very well blow up in their faces.

  If we had an opposition party, this would be a BIG issue.

There was a post on the board here once about "the bush tax"

I seem to recall it went something like this.

1. bush proposes unfunded federal mandates like no child left behind and hippa, and as a result, states have to raise property taxes - mine went up 100.00 a month.

2. the bush republicans work as handmaiden to the oil company, cheney writes his energy policy with the energy industry heads behind closed doors. Gas prices skyrocket 270% , we pay an additional 30.00 per week / every week. 120.00 a month. The same oil companies are now trying to run advertisements and marketing - paying billions of dollars - to hide the fact that they're just taking the additional premium on gas, as nothing more than a windfall profit.  (after all, since when does price per barrel of oil have anything to do with how many refineries you can operate to drive the price per +gallon+ of the pumped gas up or down?)

3. the bush republicans , again in the pocket of the same lobbyists that ran up oil prices - not only got us into a global warming jam but cost us 990 billion dollars and lost lives when they couldnt even respond to a class THREE not FIVE hurricane with their - no other way to describe it - OILY appointments at the head of FEMA

4. These fellows, like Cheney and Bush and Rove, are costing us 120 billion dollars a year in their oil company sponsored / Haliburton Energy contracted war against a country that did not pose any threat at all to ours. None. The same fellows are costing us American lives - and ruining the lives of our soldiers as they are directed to kill innocent civilians. A cost that any christian could not bear.

5. Finally they're costing us heavy at the church - these fellows used evangelicals to get themselves into power, and they're constantly monkeying with a hugely expensive line between church and state. This is a wall that Ben Franklin, George Washington, John Adams and Tom Jefferson built at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of colonial dollars. This wall has protected our churches for years.

Lets talk real cost. Tuition is chicken feed. These guys are a multi trillion dollar drain.

I mean, I don't know of any teenagers who are independently wealthy enough or savvy enough to be paying taxes on dividends and capital gains from investments.  More likely the transfer of wealth to kids for college was just another way for the wealthy to pay LESS taxes.  So in the end, it is likely Bush's "base" will be more pissed off about this than I will.  

Still, though, Bush has approved a tax increase - so much for "read my lips" -- oh, that was his daddy.

A list of who voted for this bill would be helpful. It is quite difficult to ferret out voting records on the .gov sites. I'd love to know if any dems crossed over to support this.

And second, as a father of 15 yr old twins, this tax increase hurts - it hurts directly and doubly. It will cause me to shift more of their college savings into US Treasury I-bonds, which are not taxed until you cash them in (like when the kids are over 17 years old). In this way you can avoid this new tax burden entirely. I don't want to sound too much like a commercial for I-bonds, but they do defer tax obligations and function as a good inflation hedge as well.

I didn't come from a family where there was any thought to paying taxes on investments for a teenager. We didn't have that kind of money to invest.

But I did come from a family where a strong work ethic was important, and when I started working at the usual kinds of jobs for 15-17 year olds (fast food and retail), I remember being angry everytime I looked at a paycheck and saw they were taking out taxes when I couldn't vote for the people who were spending that tax money.

That's why today I support groups likeNYRA, the National Youth Rights Association. It really is sad that the one of the main reasons we fought the revolutionary war is ignored today.

We could use more reporters like him.

Well there is still a way to save for college tax-free: state 529 plans. These accounts allow you to put away money for children and it grows tax free. The other benefit is that these accounts remain in the legal name of the parent or the person making the contributions. That is, if the beneficiary becomes a juvenile deliquent or decides not to go to college for whatever reason, the person making the contributions has control. That means that the kid can't liquidate the account on a car or something stupid.

The downside is that if you need the money for any other reason there is a 10% tax for withdrawls not connected to education. But still it is a tax-free way to put money away for children. In some states, such as Washington, DC, you can even deduct what you put in these accounts off of the state tax return.