Year End Tax Strategies - one day too late

TaxProf Blog is in my opinion the best tax blog on the net. But I was confused by a poll response run on the blog of the top year end tax strategy. The top strategies, which are lists in this post have a couple of problems. First, I am pretty sure that they are not in the right order. The first strategy, would always be to reduce one's income - i.e. to max your contribution to a retirement plan. Some of the others in the list are subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax and thus would not be as good in terms of an overall strategy. Others are special situations where the strategy might not work for a majority of taxpayers.

The retirement contribution strategy works for every taxpayer and with the current standards, especially if you are over 50, those strategies are both timely and good long term ideas. Several, including the mortgage payment and property tax strategies (although I would admit I used both) are narcotic like - once done, if you then fail to do them the next year, your tax liability increases.

It is an interesting problem, none-the-less. One wonders what the new congress will have in store for us in the coming year relating to taxes. It is likely that they will not do much to encourage capital formation and that is one of those long term issues that is a lot more important than individual strategies. I am sure I will be talking a lot about that in the coming year.