Tax time backdrop to Obama tax talk

This, the traditional tax-filing day, finds elected officials in Washington blustering anew over who ought to give how much to Uncle Sam.

While perhaps you are still preparing your 1040 to meet this year's extended deadline on Monday, the Congress on Thursday gave the annual ritual an extra dose of background noise. Lawmakers acted to slice an estimated $38 billion from the budget, as agreed across the major parties.

That doesn't end it. Partisan posturing over taxes and spending mounts in preparation for next year's elections. On Friday, the House GOP majority is set to make a further statement by voting on its own deficit plan.

Recall that in 2008, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden said the wealthy should get ready to ante up more, prompting a predictable GOP campaign backlash.

"It's time to be patriotic," Biden said in an interview, "time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help America get out of the rut."

The other day, it looked as if Biden had rested his case and then some. As President Barack Obama blasted the idea that the poor and elderly should sacrifice their benefits to pay for tax breaks for the rich, Biden, seated in the audience, appeared to be nodding off.

Maybe it was all just too obvious to Biden. Or maybe Obama's statements generally proved less than jolting to those who follow this stuff.

Obama proposed lowering future deficits by $4 trillion over 12 years, partly by trimming Medicare and Medicaid costs, partly by slashing military funding (pegged at 28 percent to 38 percent of federal expenditures), and partly by raising revenues -- including an end to tax cuts for wealthier Americans enacted during the Bush administration and extended with Obama's consent late last year.

According to the U.S. Census, the share of aggregate household income controlled by those in the lowest 20 percent of income has declined from 4.1 percent in 1997 to 3.6 percent nowadays. The share controlled by the highest 20 percent went from 43 percent to 49.4 percent, the agency said.

"The share of income controlled by the top 5 percent of households has increased from 16.6 percent to 21.7 percent," the census website says.

The president talked about closing big tax loopholes. List that, too, as nothing that would rouse Biden, or anyone else.

If you believe tax-dodge strategies are trivial, consider an October report by Jesse Drucker of Bloomberg News about Google Inc. slicing its taxes $3.1 billion over the prior three years by moving most foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.

Said the story: "Google's income shifting -- involving strategies known to lawyers as the 'Double Irish' and the 'Dutch Sandwich' -- helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings."

"Tax revolt" talk has shaped the political discussion of recent years, from the shores of California to the ballots of Nassau County. But modern tax-law adventures like Google's show how far we've come from, say, the days of the Whiskey Rebellion. That insurrection -- named for a 1791 excise tax on whiskey that Pennsylvania farmers resisted -- was played out during George Washington's presidency.

Which is to say that tax tension has always been with us.

No wonder this traditional mid-April deadline packs more political punch than Presidents Day, even if one or two of the faithful might snooze.