Month: February 2013

A new short report from Citizens for Tax Justice explains that House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp has put forward an intriguing proposal to reform the tax treatment of derivatives — the complex financial instruments that played a starring role in the financial collapse. As the report explains, Camp unfortunately proposes to use any revenue saved from his reforms to pay for reductions in tax rates.

Derivatives can create huge opportunities for tax avoidance. To take just one example explained in the report, Ronald S. Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder fortune, used a derivative called a “variable prepaid forward contract” to sell stock without paying taxes on the capital gains for a long time. Lauder entered into a contract to lend $72 million worth of stock to an investment bank and promised to sell the stock to the bank at a future date at a discounted price, in return for an immediate payment of cash. The contract also hedged against any loss in the value of the stock.

The contract put Lauder in a position that is economically the same as having sold the stock — he received cash for the stock and did not bear the risk of the stock losing value — and yet he does not have to pay tax on the capital gains until several years later, when the sale of the stock technically occurs under the contact.

The most significant of Chairman Camp’s proposals would subject most derivatives to what is called “mark-to-market” taxation. At the end of each year, gains and losses from derivatives would be included in income, even if the derivatives were not sold.

Assuming the mark-to-market system is implemented properly without loopholes or special exemptions for those with lobbying clout, the result would be that the types of tax dodges described above would no longer provide any benefit. The taxpayers would not bother to enter into those contracts because they would be taxed at the end of the year on the value of the contracts (meaning they are unable to defer taxes on capital gains) and the gains would be taxed at ordinary income tax rates.

The reform could be key to blocking the sort of tax dodges available only to the very rich.

Over the weekend, President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid both stated that closing tax loopholes is part of the solution to replacing the coming sequestration of federal spending.

CTJ’s recently updated working paper on tax reform options identifies three categories of reforms that would accomplish this. They include ending tax breaks and loopholes that allow wealthy individuals to shelter their investment income from taxation, ending breaks and loopholes that allow large, profitable corporations to shift their profits offshore to avoid U.S. taxes, and limiting the ability of wealthy individuals to use itemized deductions and exclusions to lower their taxes.

Sequestration: Spending Cuts No One Seems to Want

In 2011, President Obama and Congress agreed to across-the-board sequestration (automatic spending cuts) that they hoped to replace with more targeted, thought-out deficit-reduction measures.

Under the law they enacted, the Budget Control Act of 2011 (the BCA), the sequester was supposed to take effect in the beginning of this year. But the recent deal addressing the “fiscal cliff” replaced the first two months of sequester savings with some arcane accounting gimmicks, so now the sequester begins March 1 if Congress does not act. Between then and the end of the year, it would cut spending by $85 billion. Over a decade, the sequester will cut spending by $1.2 trillion.   

Those cuts are spread evenly across defense and non-defense spending, affecting the programs favored by politicians of every ideological stripe. Lawmakers agree that they do not like the scheduled sequester. Congressional Republican leaders argue that it should be replaced entirely with spending cuts while Democratic leaders in Congress and President Obama insist that revenue increases must be involved.

Revenue Is the Answer

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out that if the sequester is averted with spending cuts and no revenue increases, that will mean that the combination of all the deficit-reduction measures, which began in 2011, would include five times as much in spending cuts as revenue increases. The President is calling for any deficit reduction from this point on to include an equal share of spending cuts and revenue increases. But even this would mean that the combination of all these deficit-reduction measures would include twice as much in spending cuts as revenue increases.

A fair approach would be for Congress to replace the sequester entirely with new revenue. There are several reform options described in CTJ’s working paper that would raise hundreds of billions of dollars over the coming decade.

Some of these reform options could be enacted on their own, like President Obama’s proposal to limit the tax savings of each dollar of deductions and exclusions to 28 cents. Others are more likely to be part of a larger tax reform, like ending the rule allowing corporations to “defer” (not pay) U.S. taxes on their offshore profits or ending the provision in the personal income tax exempting capital gains at death. All of these reforms would end or cut back tax breaks that are hugely beneficial to extremely wealthy families and large corporations but not to low- and middle-income families.

Our partner organization, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) is continuing to generate a lot of publicity in the states for its recent Who Pays? report examining the fairness (or lack thereof) of every state’s tax system.  The Tennessean explains, for example, that: “Tennessee is often championed as a low-tax state. But for struggling families, it might not be among the fairest.”

In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, Sharon Ward of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center explained ITEP’s report to CBS Philly by saying that: “We are in a club we don’t want to be in — one of the ‘Terrible Ten States’ that has the most regressive tax systems. And really, we got here for a very important reason: we have a flat income tax that fails to offset the more regressive taxes: sales and property taxes.”

And in Wyoming, the Equality State Policy Center (ESPC) is using ITEP’s new Who Pays? data to make the case for enacting a state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).  ESPC explains that the credit could make a long-overdue increase in the state’s gasoline tax much fairer by mitigating its impact on low-income families.

We recently profiled the four states looking most seriously at “tax swaps” that would offset big income tax cuts with a regressive sales tax hike — Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, and North Carolina.  New Mexico can now be added to that list.  Two lawmakers there say they would like to expand the sales tax to apply to “virtually everything that happens” in the state and then repeal the personal and corporate income taxes.  But economists in New Mexico say that the plan is “pretty much guaranteed to be regressive and shift the tax burden.”

Bipartisan legislation in Texas would remedy the state’s “astounding deficit of knowledge when it comes to tax expenditures” — or special tax breaks (PDF). The report proposes a number of smart reforms recommended by ITEP.  Those reforms include rigorous reviews aimed at determining whether tax breaks have fulfilled their goals, and “sunset provisions” designed to force a vote on special tax breaks that would otherwise continue on autopilot for years or decades on end.