Month: February 2011

Next week the Senate is expected to take up the patent reform bill which, as of today, includes a provision to prohibit patents on tax strategies. Opponents are expected to offer amendments to weaken the language or completely strip this provision from the legislation.

Since 1998, when a federal appeals court ruled that business methods could be patented, the U.S. Patent Office has granted more than 115 tax strategy patents and more than 150 applications are in process. The holders of these patents can charge a fee to taxpayers that use their strategies.

Citizens for Tax Justice joined other national organizations in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee to make sure the provision banning tax strategy patents stays in the bill. As Senator Carl Levin has noted, the primary rationale for issuing patents is to encourage innovation and “the last thing we need is a further incentive for aggressive tax shelters.”

Despite reporting nearly $10 billion in domestic pre-tax profits between 2008 and 2010, the Boeing Corporation, which was granted a contract worth as much as $35 billion to build airplanes for the federal government earlier this week, did not pay a dime of U.S. federal corporate income taxes during this three-year period.

Read the report.

CTJ’s critique of claims that wealthy New Yorkers are fleeing the state’s so-called “millionaires’ tax” was publicized by two media outlets this week.  Similar claims being made in Connecticut and Rhode Island were also shot down in the media.

In last week’s Digest, CTJ pointed out numerous distortions in the Partnership for New York’s claims that wealthy New Yorkers were fleeing as a result of a recent tax increase on high-income earners.  (The Fiscal Policy Institute also issued a detailed rebuttal). 

For starters, the Partnership erroneously claimed that a “9.4 percent decrease in the state’s taxpayers who earn $1 million or more” occurred between 2007 and 2009.  But the data it used (but failed to cite) actually show a 9.4% drop in New Yorkers with wealth exceeding $1 million.  Since New York’s income tax obviously applies to income — not wealth — this is an important distinction. 

The Partnership has since revised its report to correct this mistake, but it continues to ignore a much more important one: according to the same dataset, every state in the country saw its number of wealthy taxpayers decline between 2007 and 2009 (due to the recession) and 43 states experienced declines exceeding New York’s 9.4% drop.  In fact, Phoenix International – the firm that released the data – made very clear in its 2009 press release that the U.S. as a whole saw its millionaire population decline by nearly 14%.  So it’s a little odd, to say the least, that the Partnership would interpret New York’s 9.4% rate of decline as providing any evidence that could be useful in its crusade against taxing high-income earners.

Fortunately, Robert Frank at the Wall Street Journal’s Wealth Report quickly publicized CTJ’s analysis, and labeled the Partnership’s migration claims a “myth.”  Frank also followed up with the Partnership’s CEO, who when confronted with the data problems described above retreated by saying: “It’s a very difficult thing to measure… We get a lot of it anecdotally.”

Crain’s New York Business similarly picked up on the CTJ analysis, ultimately declaring that “the nationwide decline suggests that New York lost millionaires primarily because New Yorkers made less money and saw their property values drop during the recession, not because they moved to other states.” 

Crain’s does err, however, in claiming that the data might partially reflect the fact that “New Yorkers could have left the state in mid-2009 and filed 2009 tax returns as residents of their new states.”  The 2009 data in question was actually released in early July 2009, and was left unchanged in the September 2010 update.  It is exceedingly unlikely that a dataset released just two months after the May 2009 enactment of New York’s “millionaires’ tax” could have captured the effects of any tax-induced wealth flight.

In addition to beating back ridiculous claims in New York, the WSJ’s Wealth Report also recently debunked similar claims being made in Connecticut by the Connecticut Policy Institute.  The story is a familiar one:

“How do we know why or even if high-earners moved out? It is possible that some previously high earners simply fell below the $1 million-dollar-a-year mark because their incomes fluctuated. In the land of hedge funds, this seems to be just as likely as people moving to Florida. It also is unclear whether the population of high-earners in Connecticut is aging and simply moved to warmer, more golf-friendly climes…The report doesn’t break down the destinations. Still, it says many go to Florida and New York. Florida, of course, has no state income tax. But New York state has a top tax rate of 8.97% and New York City’s top rate is 3.876%. Combined that is nearly twice as high as Connecticut’s tax. If the rich decide where to live based on taxes, why would they be moving to a higher-tax city? Perhaps because the quality of their life matters as much or more than the quantity of their taxes—up to a point, of course.”

Finally, Rhode Island claims of wealth flight ran into similar resistance in the media when Politifact took a lengthy look at the Ocean State Policy Research Institute’s (OSPRI) migration claims, and ultimately found them to be “false.” 

OSPRI’s report attempts to show that “the most significant driver of out-migration [from Rhode Island] is the estate tax.”  But as Politifact notes, “IRS data cited by OSPRI shows that Florida was increasingly attractive to Rhode Island taxpayers in the years when it had an estate tax. The flow slacked off significantly when the [Florida estate] tax was eliminated. That runs contrary to the trend OSPRI claims to have proven.” 

Moreover, Politifact points out that even the conservative Tax Foundation — hardly a big fan of the estate tax — hasn’t jumped onto the migration bandwagon: “Kail Padquitt, staff economist for The Tax Foundation … said he hasn’t seen any proof that the prospect of paying estate taxes drives people to move.”  We certainly haven’t either.

Huge changes to Missouri’s tax system are being debated, ranging from terrible ideas (repeal of the main business tax and replacing the income tax with an enormous sales tax) to excellent (making the state’s tax structure more progressive than it is now).

In bad news, the state Senate has voted to gradually phase out the state’s corporate franchise tax. This is a tax that was established in 1917 and is levied on the greater of either the total assets of a corporation or the value of its paid up capital stock.  Now it’s up to the House of Representatives to see if it will follow suit and eliminate this tax, which in fiscal year 2009 brought in $83 million for the state. In even worse news, the so-called “Fair Tax” continues to move forward. This proposal would eliminate the state’s income tax and replace the revenue with a broader sales tax. The latest news we reported was that the State Auditor couldn’t estimate what the sales tax rate would need to be to make the proposal revenue-neutral.

Despite the lack of such basic information, the legislature approved the various versions of the ballot initiative (which would all basically do the same thing) for the 2012 ballot. Meanwhile, efforts are still underway to enact the “Fair Tax” through the legislature, without a ballot measure.

On a much brighter note, Representative Jeanette Mott Oxford (D-St. Louis) and 23 co-sponsors have filed HB 637, which would modernize the state’s income tax rates and brackets, eliminate the state’s deduction for federal income taxes paid, and introduce a per-person refundable credit.  The bill would make the state’s tax structure more progressive while also providing much needed revenue. This legislation is a bright light in the darkness of Missouri’s tax debate.

The Iowa House of Representatives has approved a bill to cut income taxes by 20 percent, despite an analysis from ITEP showing that the richest 1 percent of Iowans would receive an average of $6,822 while those in the bottom quintile would enjoy a break of just $18 on average.

The bill, H.F. 194, which reduces income tax rates by 20 percent across the board, will now go to the Senate. For more information, see the Iowa Policy Project’s brief on this enormous tax cut.

Debate over the recommendations from Georgia’s Special Council on Tax Reform continues. Should the state flatten its income tax rates? Should the state broaden the income tax base? Folks are likely still making up their minds about how they feel about adding groceries back to the sales tax base, among other possible changes.

Georgians concerned about tax fairness should read the new brief from the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. It offers several alternatives (using ITEP data) that would tweak the Council’s recommendations and would improve the tax fairness implications of the Council’s initial proposal.

The budget outline released by President Obama this week, just like last year’s proposal, includes about $3.5 trillion in tax cuts over ten years. Most of that cost comes from his $3.1 trillion proposal to make permanent most of the Bush tax cuts, which would cost 81 percent as much as extending all the Bush tax cuts.

The President’s budget outline does include several laudable provisions to raise revenue, but not nearly enough to offset the costs of the proposed tax cuts.

The net effect of the tax proposals in the budget plan would be to reduce federal revenue by $2.8 trillion over ten years, compared to what would happen if the Bush tax cuts simply expired (as they will under current law if Congress does nothing).

Read the report.