Snow: 'Everything On the Table' for Tax Reform

WASHINGTON -- Treasury Secretary John Snow said all options remained open for a bipartisan panel that will examine potentially far-reaching reforms to the American tax code, Agence France Presse reported.

"The president will ask the panel and ask me to give him the very best thinking across the board on how to produce broad-based reform of the tax system. So everything is on the table," Snow said.

The panel, which President Bush has yet to appoint, will make its recommendations as soon as possible in 2005, and proposals could go to lawmakers before the end of next year, Snow told the Fox News Sunday television program. Snow said the experts will try to hammer out a plan for "a fairer tax system, a simpler tax system, getting out all this complexity, and finally, a tax system that's more pro-growth."

Meanwhile, neither Snow nor Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, would say whether Bush's ideas about overhauling the federal retirement program would include raising the limit on incomes subject to Social Security taxes.

Asked on ABC's This Week whether that was possible, Card said: "The rate that you and I pay, contribute, to our Social Security, the president does not want to see that rate increased." He would go no further in subsequent questioning.

-- NYSSCPA.org News Staff

Posted on 12/20/04