Glimmers of Hope on Taxes in the States

It seems that each week brings another round of regressive tax proposals from the states, but there are a few bright spots. As previously reported, the governors in Connecticut, Hawaii and Minnesota have been strong proponents for taking a balanced approach to their state’s budget gaps and have unabashedly supported raising revenue in mostly reform-minded and progressive ways.  More details emerged this week on the Connecticut and Minnesota governors’ revenue-raising proposals.   Also, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, who recently backed a successful initiative to increase the state’s flat personal income tax rate, started sending positive messages this week about the need to make his state’s tax system fairer.

On Wednesday, Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy released his plan to deal a budget gap exceeding $3 billion. As promised, his plan would not to rely solely on spending cuts to close the gap. He offered a $1.5 billion package of new revenues including reforms to the personal income tax, sales tax, business taxes, and estate tax.
  
Under his plan, the state’s personal income tax would expand from 3 to 8 brackets, the top marginal rate would increase from 6.5 to 6.7 percent, and the bottom marginal rate of 3 percent would phase out for high-income earners.  The plan also eliminates an existing property tax credit which is most beneficial to middle-income families. 

Perhaps most significantly, Governor Malloy would buck a recent trend by adding a refundable state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) set at 30 percent of the federal program.  If enacted, Connecticut would become the 26th state to have an EITC.
 
Governor Malloy also proposed expanding the sales tax base by taxing several services, including pet grooming, boat repairs and hair cuts, eliminating the exemption on clothing under $50, and imposing an additional 3 percent sales tax on “luxury items.  The state sales tax rate would increase from 6 to 6.25 percent. 

Governor Malloy also supports positive changes to business taxation including adopting what is known as the “throwback rule,” which mandates that sales into other states or to the federal government that are not taxable will be “thrown back” into the state of origin for tax purposes.  His plan would improve the estate tax by lowering the taxable estate threshold from $3.5 million to $2 million.

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton ran on a pro-tax platform, promising to increase taxes on his state’s wealthiest households in order to stave off massive spending reductions.  Governor Dayton released a plan this week to raise $4.1 billion in new revenues over the next two years to help solve a $6.2 billion budget shortfall.   Sticking to his campaign pledge, the majority of the new revenue would be raised from the wealthiest 5 percent of taxpayers in the state. The plan would add a new top income tax bracket, charge a 3 percent surtax on filers with taxable income above $500,000, and add a new statewide property tax on homes valued at more than $1 million.

The Minnesota Budget Project had the following to say about Governor Dayton’s proposal: “The Governor’s tax proposal seeks to add balance to the state’s tax system. Over time, the state has cut progressive taxes (like the income tax) during good times and increased regressive taxes (like property taxes) during the bad times. These policy changes, combined with economic trends, have led to a tax system that has shifted more of the responsibility for funding state and local services on to low- and moderate-income Minnesotans. People at the highest income levels pay a smaller share of their income in state and local taxes (8.9 percent) than the average for all Minnesotans (11.2 percent).”

Illinois lawmakers should be applauded for temporarily raising the state’s flat income tax rate from 3 to 5 percent in January to help fill a $15 billion budget gap. However, they missed an opportunity to fix the state’s broken, outdated, and unfair tax system rather than just raise rates.  But the opportunity may still be available.  This week, Governor Pat Quinn asked state lawmakers to consider modernizing the tax system and making it fairer.  He did not offer specific suggestions on how to achieve this goal, but explained that Illinois’ tax system is regressive, requiring more from its poorest residents than from the rich. 

In response to his call for reform, some Democratic lawmakers offered a few suggestions, including moving the state to a graduated income tax, expanding the sales tax base to include services, and relying less on property taxes to pay for schools.

Virginia Governor Says No to EITC Expansion, Yes to Corporate Tax Breaks to Pull Kids Out of Public Schools

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The Virginia Senate voted down a bill this week which would have provided tax credits to corporations that give scholarships to low-income children in order to attend private schools.  The proposal was backed by Governor McDonnell as part of his “Opportunity to Learn” initiative and passed the House of Delegates on February 8.

Critics of the bill argued that the tax credit would divert the state’s general fund dollars away from the public school system towards private schools.  Proponents, including the Governor, claimed it would afford low-income students educational opportunities they would otherwise not be able to access.

The debate over the education tax credit bill contrasts vividly with Virginia’s reduction in Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) benefits last year.  Virtually every state with an EITC ties its benefits to the federal program.  However, when President Obama expanded the federal EITC, Virginia was one of two states that decided to “decouple” its EITC from the federal changes.  Obama’s EITC expansion increased benefits for families with three or more children and reduced the marriage penalty.  This would have made a minimal impact on the cost of Virginia’s EITC, which is set at 20 percent of the federal level, yet would have provided greater benefits to low-income families.

Of course, decoupling creates administrative difficulties, because it’s far easier to calculate a state EITC that is simply a percentage of the federal one.

Soon, Virginia will again be faced with this decoupling issue.  The federal tax compromise enacted in December of 2010 extended the Obama EITC expansion through 2012.  When the issue arises again, lawmakers and citizens should grapple with why Virginia’s governor and House members seem willing to provide a tax credit to corporations for removing low-income children from public schools, but not a credit that goes directly into the hands of hard-working Americans.

If the State Auditor Can’t Estimate It, Then It’s Very Likely Too Radical a Shift

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In what is surely a blow to anti-taxers and so-called “fair tax” advocates, Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich recently said that the impact of ballot initiatives to eliminate the state’s income tax and replace the revenue with an expanded sales tax cannot be estimated.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Kansas City Star determined that “Schweich’s office said the impact on state revenues could not be determined because there are too many actions required by lawmakers and too many uncertainties about how consumers will respond to the new tax.”

One of the largest questions about these initiatives is what the sales tax rate would need to be to ensure that this radical shift is revenue-neutral. Despite the Auditor’s misgivings about offering an estimated rate, ITEP and others have. For example, a recent ITEP analysis based on legislation from last year found that the rate would need to be more than 11 percent. Jim Moody, a lobbyist who used to be Governor John Ashcroft’s Commissioner of Administration, found that the sales tax rate would need to be more than 12 percent. He went further, calling the ballot initiatives “fiscally untenable” and suggested that they would “either bankrupt the state or, in the alternative, bankrupt the poor and the working lower- and middle-income classes.”

Tax rate estimates aside, if the State Auditor can’t estimate the impact of this radical change to the state’s tax structure, that should be the first clue that perhaps this ballot initiative, bankrolled by millionaire anti-taxer Rex Sinquefield, isn’t in the best interest of most Missouri families or businesses.

States Take a Knife to One of Their Major Arteries: Corporate Income Taxes

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It’s pretty evident that state corporate income taxes are especially flawed and riddled with loopholes. But, of course, that doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, there are lots of things that legislators can do (given the political will) to strengthen their corporate income taxes, including enacting combined reporting, increasing corporate tax disclosure, and closing selected loopholes.

Despite all these options to strengthen the corporate tax, lawmakers from coast to coast are doing their best to undermine this inherently progressive tax. This seems especially sort-sighted given the revenue needs of many states.

Here are some recent bad ideas regarding state corporate income taxes:

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s budget outline includes a proposal that would phase out the state’s corporate income tax over four years.  

Florida Governor Rick Scott has proposed reducing the corporate income tax rate from 5.5 to 3 percent.

Indiana’s Senate is considering a bill to reduce the state’s corporate income tax by 20 percent. This bill recently passed the Senate Committee on Tax and Fiscal Policy.

Iowa Governor Terry Branstad has said that he would like to cut Iowa’s corporate income tax in half, despite evidence that this tax change would only benefit large corporations.

Recently, bills have been dropped in the both the Kansas House of Representatives and the Senate which would phase out the state’s corporate income tax altogether.

North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue is proposing that the corporate income tax rate be reduced to 4.9 percent from 6.9 percent.

Instead of slashing or completely eliminating the state corporate income tax, lawmakers should be working to strengthen this revenue source.

Tax Avoider Amazon.com Messes with Texas

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Online retailers benefit from a tax loophole which allows for internet sellers to avoid collecting sales taxes from customers unless the company has a physical presence in their state. This has given companies like Amazon.com an unfair advantage over “bricks and mortar” stores and smaller, locally owned businesses all over America who must collect sales taxes from customers.

One place where Amazon.com certainly does have a physical presence is Texas. Recently, Texas asked Amazon.com to pay $269 million dollars in past due sales taxes.  The company runs a distribution center in the state and, as the Texas Comptroller said, “If you have a physical business presence in the state of Texas, you owe sales tax.”  Amazon refused to pay the bill, claiming a subsidiary owned the distribution center.  Last week, news came that Amazon has decided to shut down the center because they were “unable to come to a resolution with the Texas comptroller’s office.”  As the Dallas Morning News explained it, “Amazon.com has decided to take its ball and go home.”

Of course, the real answer to this problem is for Congress to end the loophole by allowing states to require sales tax collection from any company that sells to its residents.

Authors of New York Study Claiming Millionaires Fleeing Reach New Low and Just Make Up Numbers

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In the past year, we’ve documented ad nauseum the lengths that anti-tax advocates will go to in order to convince lawmakers that the so-called “millionaire’s tax” is prompting wealthy taxpayers to move to other states. In Maryland, New Jersey and Oregon, these groups have selectively presented data in order to “show” that resident millionaires are packing up their Lear Jets and moving to Florida. And in each case, we’ve shown that when the data are presented honestly and fully, there’s simply no evidence that millionaires are voting with their feet.

But the latest such effort, by the Partnership for New York City, breaks new ground by simply making data up. For example, the report says that “Since the imposition of New York’s surcharge in 2009, there has been a 9.4 percent decrease in the state’s taxpayers who earn $1 million or more, decreasing from 381,786 in 2007 to 345,892 in 2009.” Take a minute and read that quote again. What the Partnership is implying is that millionaires had the magical ability to see into the future and start moving out of New York in 2007 and 2008 as a result of a tax increase that hadn’t even happened yet.

Next, it’s worth taking a closer look at that 381,786 figure, the supposed amount of millionaires in New York in 2007. Interestingly enough there is state-by-state data available from the IRS which shows that there were actually only 375,265 returns with federal adjusted gross income over $200,000 in 2007. Of course, not all 375,265 returns were all millionaires. So the 381,786 figure sited by the Partnership is troubling to say the least.

What is even more troubling is that there isn’t actual data available (from New York or the federal government) for 2009 showing the number of tax returns by income group. Which leaves us with a very troubling question — where does the Partnerships earlier figure of 345,892 millionaires in 2009 actually come from?

The answer: they’re using a forecast of the number of households in each state with wealth, not income, of $1 million or more. See the data. Released last September by a marketing firm, these estimates tell us a few interesting things. One is that between 2007 and 2009, the nation as a whole lost 13.9 percent of its net-worth “millionaires” between 2007 and 2009, which makes the 9.4 percent loss for New York seem not that impressive. Another is that 43 of the 50 states lost proportionally more of their net-worth “millionaires” over this period than did New York. So, leaving aside the minor detail that income taxes are based on income rather than wealth, which makes these marketing data utterly irrelevant to the point the Partnership is trying to make, any objective look at this data would suggest that New York is doing better than most other states.

For more on the many flaws of the Partnership’s paper, read this brief from the Fiscal Policy Institute. Suffice to say, the theory that New York millionaires are moving because of a targeted tax increase is based on deeply flawed (and perhaps even made up) data.

Geithner Rejects Sen. Barbara Boxer’s Proposal for Tax Holiday for Corporations’ Offshore Profits

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Lawmakers in Congress have been discussing a second tax holiday for U.S. corporations’ offshore tax profits, after having sworn that the first such holiday, enacted in 2004, would be a one-time event.

Typically, when multinational U.S. corporations bring overseas profits back to the United States (when they “repatriate” offshore profits) they have to pay U.S. corporate income taxes. The statutory tax rate for corporate income is 35 percent, although corporations of course use many breaks and loopholes to lower their effective rate.

The tax holiday that was enacted in 2004 allowed companies to repatriate their profits and pay taxes at a rate of just 5.25 percent (that is, almost nothing).

The biggest problem is that if Congress shows that it is willing to repeat this “one-time” tax holiday, then corporations will actually have an incentive to shift profits, and perhaps even operations and jobs, offshore. Corporations could then simply wait for the next “one-time” tax holiday to bring those profits back to the U.S.

One of the lawmakers pushing the proposal is the ostensibly progressive Senator Barbara Boxer of California.

The administration decided that the adults needed to intervene. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner made a public statement this week that the administration does not support the idea. However, even Geithner’s statement did include an alarming caveat when he said, “We are not going to look at a [tax] holiday outside the context of comprehensive reform.” (Emphasis added.)

Proponents of a tax holiday insist that companies use the money they bring back to the U.S. to create jobs, but data from the last time Congress allowed multinationals to bring back foreign profits at a very low tax rate indicates that the cash primarily ended up in the hands of shareholders through dividends and stock redemptions.

See our earlier report explaining why the repatriation tax holiday is a terrible idea.

Obama Proposes Fixes to Unemployment Insurance Financing

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The Obama administration has proposed to change the way unemployment insurance is financed to avoid tax increases on businesses that will otherwise occur automatically — but Republicans in Congress are resisting the plan because it allows for the possibility that states will collect more taxes overall from employers in the future.

Unemployment insurance benefits are generally financed by state taxes on employers while the administration of the program is financed by federal taxes on employers. The state tax revenue is saved in trust funds from which benefits are paid, but these had run dry in most states at the end of 2010, so states were allowed to borrow from the federal trust fund. States must eventually pay that money back with interest, but the economic recovery act enacted in 2009 gave states a break on the interest payments for almost two years.

The federal UI taxes on employers will increase automatically, under current law, in many states this year or next year to pay for the principal on those loans from the federal trust fund. On top of that, states must start paying the interest, and for this they often levy additional state taxes on employers. All of this is scheduled to occur at a time when economists agree that the recession is far from over.

The Obama administration’s plan would respond by delaying the automatic increase in federal UI taxes on employers and the due date for the interest payments from the states for two years. In 2014, the plan would more than double the tax base, from $7,000 of wages for each employee (which has not been adjusted since 1983) to $15,000. The rate of the federal tax would be reduced so that the federal tax would not be increased overall. The state taxes have the same base (at a minimum) as the federal tax, so the states could collect more revenue to shore up their programs if they did not change their tax rates.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the National Employment Law Project released a report Wednesday that spells out a very similar plan and explains its benefits.

Not for the first time, Republican leaders are putting themselves on record as preferring to allow a tax increase to take place rather than support a tax bill that is not exactly what they want.

Super Bowl Ad about Taxes from Corporate Astroturf Group

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The last place you would ever expect a discussion of tax policy is in the sea of Super Bowl commercials about beer, cars, and Doritos, yet the organization Americans Against Food Taxes spent over $3 million to change that last Sunday.

The ad, called “Give Me a Break”, features a nice woman shopping in a grocery store,  explaining how she does not want the government interfering with her personal life by attempting to place taxes on soda, juice, or even flavored water. The goal of the ad is to portray objections to soda taxes as if they are grounded in the concerns of ordinary Americans.

But Americans Against Food Taxes is anything but a grassroots organization. Its funding comes from a coalition of corporate interests including Coca-Cola, McDonalds and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

It is easy to understand why these groups are concerned about soda taxes, which were once considered a way to help pay for health care reform. The entire purpose of these taxes is to discourage the consumption of their products. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains in making the case for a soda tax, such a tax could be used to dramatically reduce obesity and health care costs and produce better health outcomes across the nation. Adding to this, the revenue raised could be dedicated to funding health care programs, which could further improve the general welfare.

These taxes may spread, at least at the state level.  In its analysis of the ad, Politifact verifies the ad’s claim that politicians are planning to impose additional taxes on soda and other groceries, writing that “legislators have introduced bills to impose or raise the tax on sodas and/or snack foods in Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia.”

It’s true that taxes on food generally are regressive, and taxes on sugary drinks are no exception according to a recent study. It’s a bad idea to rely on this sort of tax purely to raise revenue, but if the goal of the tax is to change behavior for health reasons, then such a tax might be a reasonable tool for social policy. We have often said the same about cigarette taxes, which are a bad way to raise revenue but a reasonable way to discourage an unhealthy behavior.

With so many states considering soda taxes and the corporate interests revving up their own campaign, the “Give Me a Break” ad may just be the opening shot in the big food tax battles to come.

Tax Giveaways for Big Business Continue to be Sold as Economic Panacea

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Lawmakers in a handful of states are pushing tax cuts for corporations and other businesses under the guise of spurring economic growth.  Florida, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, and Arizona all made headlines this week for proposed tax cuts of this sort.

In Florida, Governor Scott’s proposed budget plan was released on Monday, and as expected, it included enormous cuts to both corporate income taxes and property taxes.  Under Scott’s plan, which he unveiled before a crowd of tea party activists, the state’s already low corporate tax rate would fall from 5 percent to 3.5 percent.  At the same time, state spending would plummet by $4.6 billion, with pre-K through university education making up $3.1 billion of that total.  Fortunately, even the state’s conservative legislators don’t seem the least bit interested in Scott’s ultra-conservative (and exceedingly vague) ideas.

Kansas lawmakers generated similar headlines this week as bills were introduced in both the House and Senate to phase out the state’s corporate income tax.  According to the Wichita Eagle, proponents of the measure are actually claiming that phasing out this major tax would somehow increase tax revenue.  We seriously doubt it.

In Iowa, Governor Branstad’s proposal to slash the corporate income tax in half and cut business property taxes by 40 percent received renewed attention this week as the Des Moines Register attempted to summarize the absolutely massive number of tax cuts being proposed by Iowa lawmakers. 

Fortunately, Senate Majority Leader Michael Gronstal isn’t impressed, saying, “Taken as a whole, the Republican budget basically says we’re going to squander the opportunities for the next generation of kids in this state — in terms of education, in terms of access to community college and training programs — we’re going to push that aside and say the most important thing is to make sure corporations have tax cuts.”

Missouri lawmakers also garnered some attention this week when the state Senate endorsed legislation to repeal the state’s franchise tax on businesses over the course of the next five years.  Currently, a business must have more than $10 million in assets to be subject to the franchise tax.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran an excellent editorial this week in response to the plan, noting: “Businesses were given tax breaks, tax credits, tax incentives, low corporate taxes and tort reform. So where are the jobs? Or did they just pocket the savings? … Business-friendly is one thing. Business-promiscuous is quite another.”

It probably wouldn’t change anything, but it sure would be nice if Arizona lawmakers gave the Post-Dispatch’s editorial a read before beginning debate on the business tax cut package that Governor Brewer plans to release on Monday.