Month: October 2011

Writing for Tax Notes, CTJ director Bob McIntyre recalls “my story of CTJ’s role in the process that led to the monumental Tax Reform Act of 1986. It’s a lightly edited version of notes I took in the fall of 1986, after the bill was enacted, to remind me later of what we had done to help cause that miracle. The piece has remained unpublished until now. Of course, many others played key roles in producing TRA 1986. This is mainly just CTJ’s story, as written in the exuberance of that stars-were aligned moment.”

Read the article.

Some commentators have suggested that, because people with incomes exceeding $1 million, on average, pay higher effective tax rates than middle-income people, the problem targeted by President Obama’s “Buffett Rule” does not exist. As demonstrated in a new report from CTJ, the problem is not the effective tax rates of millionaires across the board but a particular class of millionaires whose income is mostly from investments. Investment income is taxed less than other types of income, allowing millionaire investors to pay a smaller percentage of their income in federal taxes than do many working-class people.

The report demonstrates that this problem is not isolated to rare cases. In fact, almost one third of taxpayers with income exceeding $10 million fall into this category (of taxpayers who rely on investment income for over half of their total income). Over 90 percent of taxpayers making between $60,000 and $65,000 (which includes Mr. Buffett’s famous secretary) rely on investment income for less than a tenth of their income — and pay a higher federal tax rate as a result.

The report also explains what Congress can do to implement the Buffett Rule and solve this problem. The first step, perhaps surprisingly, is to prevent repeal of health care reform, which includes a change in the Medicare tax that will take a limited first step in addressing this unfairness. Additional reforms are needed, which may include eliminating tax preferences for investment income or a surcharge on income exceeding $1 million as recently proposed by Senate Democrats.

Photo of Warren Buffett and Barack Obama via The White House Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) made a lot of noise (and news, news, news) about sales tax holidays during the recent back to school season. Seventeen states offer sales tax holidays. The rules vary widely, but in most cases they mean consumers don’t have to pay sales taxes on back to school supplies, clothes, etc. for a few days. This past August for the first time, Arkansas offered a sales tax holiday of its own.  While the sales tax revenue figures are still coming in, it’s now clear that holiday cost the state about $2.1 million in lost revenues and an additional $710,000 loss in revenues for cities and counties that collect their own local sales taxes.

Naïve state officials hoped to see an increase in sales tax revenue based on the assumption that consumers would go out and purchase more taxable items. Indeed, sales tax holiday proponents often argue that sales tax holidays actually generate new sales tax revenue, as in this report from the Florida Retail Association.

But so far the Arkansas revenue figures aren’t showing much offsetting revenue generated. The Deputy Director of the Department of Finance and Administration, Tim Leathers has admitted they “couldn’t detect any increase in consumers spending more money while they were in there buying school supplies.” Revenue officials have yet to tally September’s sales tax revenues to see if there were shifts in consumption by month, but either way it seems that the sales tax holiday didn’t provide a real and needed boost for state coffers.

John Shelnutt, an economist with the Department of Finance and Administration said, “If it did shift consumption from month to month, we’ll have to see…. Even then, it’s not a clear story. We were below forecast for the first two months of the fiscal year, which begins July 1.”

Another reason that Arkansas jumped on the sales tax bandwagon was lawmakers’ belief it would lure shoppers from neighboring states to take advantage of the holiday, but again, the numbers don’t show any evidence for this. The economist, Shelnutt, sees no “growth rate to suggest there was a cross-border rush to take advantage of the holiday.”

Myths about the utility of sales tax holidays abound.  Lawmakers too often believe these events are helpful to cash-strapped consumers, result in increased revenues and add out of state dollars to the economy.  But too often, like in Arkansas, the costs to the state as a whole far outweigh the modest benefit a handful of consumers enjoy.

We also know that not collecting sales tax on specific items for just a couple of days does nothing to help make a state’s overall tax structure more fair.  Lawmakers interested in really helping the most hard-pressed families and boosting their states’ economies have other tax reform options that offer long term and widespread benefits. Sales tax holidays, however, are more boondoggle than good policy. For  more on what they do and don’t accomplish, read ITEP’s brief.

With his recent dramatic rise to second place in the polls, Former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza Herman Cain and his infamous 9-9-9 plan were the belles of the ball at the last two Republican debates.

According to a full analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, if Cain’s 9-9-9 plan was in effect in 2011 the poorest 60 percent of taxpayers would pay an average of $2,000 more in taxes, while the richest 1 percent of taxpayers would each pay an average of $210,000 less in annual taxes. Making matters worse, the plan would have actually raised $340 billion less in revenue in 2011, meaning that it would make our deficit much worse rather than better.

Since the CTJ analysis was released, the Cain campaign has been dribbling out additional details that change the plan in an ad-hoc fashion as he struggles to defend his tax proposals.

The Washington Post and Bloomberg economic debate on October 11 broke the record for most colorful tax policy jabs, as Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman said he confused the 9-9-9 plan with “the price of a pizza”, while Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann observed that “when you take the 999 plan and you turn it upside down, I think the devil is in the details.”

During the CNN Western debate on October 18, the candidates piled on the 9-9-9 plan, arguing that the imposition of a 9 percent new sales tax would ultimately lead to higher taxes because it would give the federal government another revenue stream and could be raised in the future. Interestingly, this particular charge is not borne out by the evidence from a plethora of countries that have imposed consumption taxes, including in Canada where total revenue collected actually went down after the imposition of its value-added tax.

As we have noted a few times, however, the regressiveness of the 9-9-9 plan is no joke. The plan would replace the entire federal tax code with a nine percent national sales tax, nine percent flat income tax, and a nine percent business flat tax. It’s important to note that although the last component is called a ‘business flat tax’, it’s essentially a payroll tax rather than a flat corporate income tax as the name would imply.

For his part, Cain defended the plan saying that reading his campaign’s full analysis of the 9-9-9 plan (which was only made available publically halfway through the CNN debate) would address the “knee-jerk” reactions to his plan.

His team’s own analysis directly contradicted Cain’s point during the debate that his plan does not contain a “value-added tax.” In reality, the report refers to the business flat tax as a “subtraction method value-added tax.”

Another problem for Cain is that his campaign’s own analysis provides no evidence that the 9-9-9 plan would not be extremely regressive, though it does include a previously unmentioned “poverty grant.”

Apparently, Cain himself knows that this “poverty grant” does not allay the concerns about the plan’s regressive impact, because Cain said the next day that he’s “not going to throw the people at the poverty level under the bus” and that he has “already made provisions for that,” but hasn’t “told the public and my opponents” about what those provisions are yet.

And just today Cain announced even more significant changes to his plan. His tax plan has always included “empowerment zones” that were not defined. The Cain campaign now calls these “opportunity zones” because the word “empowerment” sounded too liberal. It’s still unclear how living in or working in an “opportunity zone” would change one’s tax bill under Cain’s plan, but he announced today that these designated areas could be free of building codes and minimum wage laws.

The Washington Post reports that he will also change his individual tax from a single-rate tax to one with several brackets. If true, this means that Cain’s plan no longer consists of three flat 9 percent taxes… which means he has given up the “9-9-9” plan.

This week Kansas Revenue Secretary, Nick Jordan, said that by the end of the year Governor Sam Brownback will have recommendations for how to reform the state’s tax structure. He said, “We’re looking at tax policy in a very comprehensive way. We’re not just focusing on business or individual incomes, I don’t know that we are targeting numbers. We’re targeting what is the best economic growth policy for the state.” This statement, combined with other media reports that the governor is working with supply side guru, Arthur Laffer, and that the governor seeks to reduce and eventually eliminate income tax rates, should cause grave concern for Kansas taxpayers.

In anticipation of the governor’s tax proposals, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) recently issued a memo to media outlets in Kansas. ITEP’s analysis shows the impact of repealing the Kansas income tax and replacing part or all of the revenue with increased sales taxes.  For example, if every dime of an income tax repeal were ultimately paid for by increases in state sales taxes, the poorest 80 percent of Kansans would, as a group, see a tax hike overall and require a statewide average sales tax rate of a whopping13.5 percent.

Governor Brownback recently told the Kansas Chamber of Commerce that in terms of low taxes and regulation, “We’ve got to look more like Texas and a lot less like California.”

But Kansas shouldn’t want to look more like Texas! The Texas tax structure doesn’t have an income tax, making it the fifth most regressive in the country and chronically unable to fund public investments. Texas ranks 45th in SAT Scores and 50th in terms of the percent of the population with a high school diploma. Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured citizens, and the second highest percentage of the population experiencing food insecurity in the nation.

We will keep an eye on the governor’s plans for Kansas, but if he’s looking for a state on which to model his tax reforms, he should take a look at Connecticut.

Photo of Sam Brownback via KDOTHQ Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

If the following actions were taken, some of the inequity that is driving the Occupy Wall Street and other affiliated protests would be eliminated. Suggestions include making corporations pay their fair share in taxes, ending the tax break for corporations that shift jobs and profits overseas, implementing the “Buffett Rule,” and imposing a tax on the “too-big-to-fail” banks…

Read the fact sheet.

Photo of Occupy Wall Street via Eye Wash Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0