Month: November 2013

For years, the economic border war between Missouri and Kansas has been the topic of discussion in those states’ respective statehouses. In a January report titled The Job-Creation Shell Game, Good Jobs First writes, “There is no jobs border war more intense these days than the one raging in the Kansas City metropolitan area…Both states unabashedly poach businesses from each other, aided by similarly structured tax credits that allow footloose companies to retain large portions of their employees’ state personal income tax.”

Now, it appears, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon is finally determined to change that.  Nixon recently told a business group that, “This so-called border war between our two states has gone on long enough” and described it as “bad for taxpayers … bad for our state budget, and it’s not good for our economy.”  Since making these statements, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback has indicated that he’s open to the idea of a truce, and the Kansas City Star explained how discussions surrounding how to implement such an agreement have been underway for more than a year.

In testimony before the National Conference of State Legislatures’ tax policy task force, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) made a strong case against the use of tax incentives to lure businesses: they often reward companies for activities they would have undertaken anyway; it’s difficult to ensure that their benefits remain entirely in-state; they often result in simply “poaching” jobs from one jurisdiction to another; and their costs can balloon far beyond what lawmakers anticipated.

The Kansas City border war is a particularly egregious example of many of these problems.  Cutting back on the wasteful use of incentives is the obvious first step that Missouri and Kansas lawmakers should take; the proposed truce would be immediately helpful to both Kansas and Missouri, and in the long run could help more states recognize that there are benefits to ending the tax incentive arms race.

Maryland has made some notable improvements to its tax system these last few years.  In 2012, lawmakers made the state’s regressive tax system (PDF) somewhat less unfair by limiting personal income tax exemptions and raising tax rates on high-income earners.  Then, in 2013, the state increased and overhauled its unsustainable gasoline tax despite the tough politics that accompany any policy that could lead to higher gas prices.

But with a major state election now less than a year away, the conversation seems to be taking a familiar, and less grown-up, tone.  The Baltimore Sun reports that four of the six candidates for governor have already incorporated “crowd-pleasing” tax cuts into their platforms in an effort to woo voters, and that the speaker of the House and president of the Senate appear interested in following their lead.  Corporate income tax cuts have attracted the most attention so far, and the Sun expects that proponents of a corporate tax cut will get a boost from some business leaders when they unveil their legislative priorities next month.

Rather than stand idly by and risk the election becoming a contest to see who can promise the longest list of tax cuts, some advocates in the state have already begun to do the hard work that’s needed to explain to lawmakers, candidates, and voters the ways in which taxes benefit the state.  The goal is to make the election year tradition of demonizing taxes a little less politically rewarding.

One recent example of such work comes from the Maryland Budget and Tax Policy Institute (MBTPI), who spotlights a recent nonpartisan study that found that a corporate income tax cut could actually result in fewer jobs, less disposable income, and/or slower population growth.  More publicity around these kinds of basic facts will be needed if the candidates whose names will appear on Maryland’s (and other states’) ballot next year are going to be convinced that they should drop their familiar refrain about the job-creating power of tax cuts

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Washington Governor Jay Inslee testified before legislators on the first day of a special session in favor of allowing tax breaks for Boeing that are estimated to cost the state $9 billion. Washington State Budget and Policy Center’s Remy Trupin issued this statement reminding lawmakers “It does not do our state’s economy any good to subsidize Boeing as they ship jobs out of state. We must ensure that significant state investments in Boeing benefit all Washingtonians.” Update: Governor Jay Inslee signed into law  tax breaks for Boeing.
 

There is a promising movement afoot in Minnesota to better fund the state’s transportation needs. The Minnesota Transportation Alliance, in next year’s legislative session, is going to propose either increasing the gas tax or, better yet, reforming it so that it grows alongside gas prices.
 

Here’s some temporary good news: The Illinois Senate adjourned without approving the litany of corporate tax breaks we told you about in an earlier post. So for now at least $88 million will stay in the state’s coffers. But the sponsor of the tax break bill, Sen. Thomas Cullerton says he expects to bring up the bill again next month. The Chicago Tribune is reporting, “even though [Cullerton] is positive he has enough votes to send the … bill to the House, he would like to secure more.”
 

Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer, managed to score a $7 million subsidy from Wisconsin taxpayers in exchange for building a distribution center in their state.  But as our partner organization, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) explains, these kinds of tax incentives are a zero-sum game that rarely pay off with any real economic benefits.

Ohio’s John Kasich is one Republican governor who wants his state to accept federal dollars from the Affordable Care Act to extend Medicaid to his neediest constituents. Kasich included that money in his budget proposal early this year, but the legislature rejected it.  But then the Governor vetoed the language rejecting those dollars in the budget bill that he finally signed. Enter the Ohio State Controlling Board – a board of six legislators and a policy adviser for the Ohio Office of Budget and Management– whose members then went ahead and voted that the state will follow the Governor’s lead and expand its Medicaid program using the federal funds. But now, six House members are plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the authority of the Board to tap into that federal Medicaid money.

Now it’s up to the courts to decide whether the Controlling Board’s actions were constitutional, but a State Senator who serves on the Board (and who also voted for the expansion) has a very specific idea of how to spend the money. Senator Chris Widener is sponsoring a bill that would turn the savings generated from Medicaid expansion (about $400 million in savings from now through June 2015) into a 4 percent across the board permanent personal income tax rate reduction.

Widener’s plan is doubly irresponsible. First, the Medicaid expansion isn’t a done deal, so the revenue to pay for a tax cut may never materialize. Secondly, legislative staff has estimated the cost of the  proposed tax cut at more than $500 million by the end of the next fiscal year—substantially more than the $404 million Ohio could see from Medicaid expansion. The tax cut Widener proposed would also disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Ohioans. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s (ITEP) analysis of the tax cut proposal in this Policy Matters Ohio (PMO) report found that Ohioans in the top 1 percent of the income spectrum would receive an average state tax cut of $1,437 a year. Middle-income families would get an average of $28, and the poorest twenty percent of Ohioans would see a tax cut averaging $1.

PMO argues that it is inappropriate to discuss tax cuts when the state has so many other unmet needs. Check out PMO’s report, “Use Medicaid savings to improve Ohio, not to give even more tax cuts to the affluent.” It gives a slew of ways in which the expected $400 million in savings could be used more productively, such as hiring police, firemen and teachers and funding preschool programs. Ohio has suffered multiple rounds of tax cuts that have eviscerated state services and local governments; any windfall revenues should be spent trying to undo some of that damage.

Thankfully, the Columbus Dispatch is reporting that the “income-tax cut is getting a cool reception from House GOP leaders.” House Speaker William Batchelder seems to agree with PMO, when he says, “The veterans are not being adequately treated. We have tremendous problems with heroin addiction in this state. We have a lot of problems, and we’d probably look there first … before we do a (tax) cut of that size.”

A newly released study sponsored by General Electric and a corporate lobbying group argues in favor of a “territorial” tax system, which House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp has proposed as part of comprehensive tax reform. Here’s Citizens for Tax Justice director Bob McIntyre’s take on the study.

General Electric and a corporate lobbying group called ACT have sponsored a “study” arguing that our economy would benefit from a “territorial” tax system — one that permanently exempts from U.S. taxes the offshore profits of American corporations. This flies in the face of overwhelming evidence that today many of these profits are really earned in the U.S. but characterized as “offshore” in order to obtain existing tax benefits that would be expanded under a territorial system. The “study” is hopelessly flawed for several reasons.

For starters, the long-term “improvement” in the U.S. economy that the report predicts is so small that it’s a rounding error. The authors claim that permanently exempting offshore corporate profits from tax would increase U.S. GDP by $22 billion a year. That’s an increase of only 0.1%. So even if one believed this would actually happen (we don’t), one wouldn’t care.

More fundamentally, the authors seem to believe that the trillions of dollars that multinational corporations claim they earn in tax havens are floating in baskets in the Caribbean, and are unavailable for use in the United States. But that’s not true. As we’ve learned from the annual reports of companies such as Apple, most of that money is actually invested in the United States, in the stock market, corporate bonds and government bonds. In other words, most of the money is already here. It just hasn’t been taxed.

The authors brush aside the problem that a permanent tax exemption for “foreign” profits would encourage American corporations to work even harder at making their U.S. profits appear to earned in other countries that don’t tax them. The authors simply assert that they don’t think a permanent exemption would be any worse than our current system of indefinite “deferral” of U.S. taxes on such profits. What they don’t mention, however, is that there is a straightforward way to fix our current system.

As CTJ and others have pointed out, the solution is to repeal “deferral” and make multinationals pay tax on their overseas profits, with a credit for taxes paid to foreign governments. This would make profit-shifting to tax havens useless, and would also end tax incentives to move operations abroad. As a bonus, ending “deferral” would reduce the federal budget deficit by over $500 billion over the next ten years, making it much easier to protect essential public programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

General Electric, one of America’s most notorious tax dodgers, wouldn’t like such a reform, of course. That’s probably why it’s never mentioned by the authors of the study.

Despite being an off-year election, there were a few significant tax policy issues at stake in the elections held this week in Colorado, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and New York City.

Ballot Measures

Colorado voters rejected Amendment 66, which would have raised $950 million in new tax revenues for education each year by converting the state’s flat rate income tax into a more progressive, graduated rate tax.

Colorado voters approved Proposition AA, imposing a 25 percent sales and excise tax rate on recreational marijuana, which voters legalized one year ago.  This 25 percent tax will be stacked on top of the 2.9 percent statewide sales tax and any local sales taxes (which average 3.2 percent).

Texas voters approved three very narrowly tailored tax breaks.  Those breaks will benefit disabled veterans, surviving spouses of military members, and manufacturers of aircraft parts.

While residents of Minnesota and Ohio didn’t vote on any statewide ballot measures this week, most of the local school tax levies on the ballot in those two states were approved by voters.

Major Candidates with Tax Plans

New Jersey residents voted to keep Governor Chris Christie in the governor’s mansion, rather than replace him with Democrat Barbara Buono.  Buono’s tax platform included raising taxes on incomes over $1 million and reversing the cut in the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) that Christie signed in 2010.  Christie, by contrast, has said he wants to cut income taxes across the board.

Virginia voters chose Democrat Terry McAuliffe over Republican Ken Cuccinelli to be their state’s next governor.  Both candidates ran on a platform of reducing or eliminating local business taxes, though neither specified how to offset the resulting revenue loss.  Cuccinelli also said that, if elected, he would have pushed for regressive personal and corporate income tax cuts, as well as a spending cap similar to Colorado’s TABOR law.

New York City residents elected Democrat Bill de Blasio over Republican Joe Lhota in the city’s mayoral race.  De Blasio wants to expand pre-K education in the city by raising taxes on incomes over $500,000, but it’s not clear whether Governor Cuomo—whose approval would be needed for the tax increase—will support such a change.

On November 1, The New York Times published on op-ed written by John Cassara, formerly a special agent for the Treasury Department tasked with following money moved illegally across borders to evade taxes or to launder profits from criminal activities. The place where the money often disappeared, he explains, was the state of Delaware, which allows individuals to set up corporations without disclosing who owns them.

“I trained foreign police forces to “follow the money” and track the flow of capital across borders.

During these training sessions, I’d often hear this: “My agency has a financial crimes investigation. The money trail leads to the American state of Delaware. We can’t get any information and don’t know what to do. We are going to have to close our investigation. Can you help?”

The question embarrassed me. There was nothing I could do.

In the years I was assigned to Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or Fincen, I observed many formal requests for assistance having to do with companies associated with Delaware, Nevada or Wyoming. These states have a tawdry image: they have become nearly synonymous with underground financing, tax evasion and other bad deeds facilitated by anonymous shell companies — or by companies lacking information on their “beneficial owners,” the person or entity that actually controls the company, not the (often meaningless) name under which the company is registered.”

Americans might comfort themselves by thinking that all countries have this problem, but Cassara points out that it is particularly bad in the U.S. He explains that a “study by researchers at Brigham Young University, the University of Texas and Griffith University in Australia concluded that America was the second easiest country, after Kenya, in which to incorporate a shell company.”

This creates enormous problems for U.S. tax enforcement efforts. It’s more difficult to persuade foreign governments to help the IRS track down money hidden offshore when several U.S. states seem to be helping people from all over their world evade taxes owed to their governments. Another problem is that much of the money hidden in shell companies incorporated in Delaware or other U.S. states may be U.S. income that should be subject to U.S. taxes, and/or income generated by illegal activities in the U.S.

The good news is that legislation has been proposed to require states to collect information on the beneficial owners (i.e., whoever ultimately owns and controls a company) when a corporation or LLC is formed and make that information available when ordered by a court pursuant to a criminal investigation. The Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act has bipartisan sponsorship in the Senate (including Senators Levin, Feinstein, Grassley and Harkin) and has been referred to the Judiciary Committee. This is an improvement over the last attempt to pass this legislation, in 2009, when it was referred to the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee (HSGAC), where it was memorably sabotaged by Delaware’s Senator Tom Carper. Last month, a similar bill was introduced in the House by Rep. Maloney.

Of course, enactment of this legislation would not solve all of the problems with our tax code. For example, it would not address the major problem of big, publicly traded corporations like Apple avoiding taxes by using offshore tax havens in ways that are (probably mostly) legal under the current rules. But, the incorporation transparency legislation would be huge progress in clamping down on tax evasion (the illegal hiding of income from the IRS) by individuals, including those engaged in other criminal activities like drug trafficking, smuggling, terrorist funding and money laundering.

In fact, as we have argued before, it is disappointing that the Obama administration has not put any real energy into advocating for this type of comprehensive legislation. This is not too much to ask for. The Conservative Prime Minister of the UK recently announced that his government would go even farther — not just recording names of owners of all UK corporations and making them available to enforcement authorities, but even automatically making those names public.

Last year the Facebook corporation made headlines when it used a single tax break—the ability to write off part of the value of executive stock options—to eliminate every last dime of federal income tax on $1 billion in US income in 2012. But for Facebook and other emerging tech companies—including Twitter, whose IPO is scheduled for this week—the best is yet to come.

A new CTJ report shows that a dozen emerging tech companies have stockpiled enough un-used tax breaks for executive stock options to eliminate all income taxes on the next $11.4 billion of US income they collectively earn—which means a net federal tax cut of $4 billion for these twelve companies.

There are familiar names here for any Internet user. LinkedIn is set to zero out tax on $571 million of US income. Priceline can expect to pay no tax on $900 million of income, and Facebook will likely be able to avoid any tax on a whopping $6.2 billion of income.

As CTJ has previously documented, hundreds of Fortune 500 companies have already used lavish executive stock options as a tax dodge. Apple alone has saved a breathtaking $3.2 billion in the last three years from this single tax break. Happily, pending legislation sponsored by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) would pare back the stock option break to a degree. The most sensible long-term step would be to repeal the stock option tax break entirely, but Levin’s bill is a welcome step in that direction.

New Report Link:
http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2013/11/twitter_and_other_tech_firms_poised_to_shelter_11_billion_in_profits_using_stock_option_tax_loophole.php