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Senate Passes Bailout Legislation Complete With Obscure Tax Breaks

Congratulations taxpayers! Your senators have ridden to the rescue and approved a piece of legislation that should ungum the credit crunch. In the process, your lawmakers also approved extended tax breaks for the film industry in Puerto Rico, and for the makers of "certain wooden arrows designed for use by children." I kid you not. […]

Congratulations taxpayers! Your senators have ridden to the rescue and approved a piece of legislation that should ungum the credit crunch. In the process, your lawmakers also approved extended tax breaks for the film industry in Puerto Rico, and for the makers of "certain wooden arrows designed for use by children."

I kid you not.

I won't bore you with the details, but if you're interested, the Puerto Rican film industry provision is on page 298 of the massive 400-plus page bill, which the senators approved Wednesday evening to Save Americans.

"The exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children," provision occurs shortly after that.

Those who received income from the settlement of the Exxon Valdez oil spill lawsuit also apparently get a break: They get to treat their proceeds as income from the fishing industry for tax purposes.

The tech industry was also given a reason to lobby for passage of the bill later this week: Attached to the legislation is the renewal of the research and development tax credit, which expired in December.

You probably haven't heard of any of these horse-trading earmark requests. That's because they're buried in an inscrutable 400+ page PDF document that no-one had the time to read during a busy workweek.

This is the kind of under-the-radar activity that the non-profit group the Sunlight Foundationhas been trying to stop with its online petition this week to ask lawmakers and others to actually read the bill (at web sites such as Read the Bill First, and Public Markup.)

Wired has suggested that the next president listen to Sunlight Foundation co-founder Ellen Miller. This might be a good time for the job applicants to start listening.

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