Author: tarek

There’s been some confusion in recent days about whether the 258 members of Congress who have signed Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” are allowed to vote in favor a bill that lets states collect sales taxes owed on purchases made over the Internet.  There is no reason for any confusion on this point.  Anybody with 15 seconds of free time and the ability to read the one sentence promise contained in the national pledge can see it’s completely irrelevant to the debate over online sales taxes:

I will: ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.

Since federal income tax rates, deductions, and credits are altered exactly zero times in the online sales tax legislation set to be voted on by the Senate, Grover’s federal affairs manager is being less than truthful when she says that “there’s really not any way an elected official [who signed the pledge] can vote for this.”

There’s no doubt that Grover would be tickled pink to have gotten 258 of our elected officials to pledge opposition to improving states’ ability to limit sales tax evasion over the Internet.  For that matter, he would probably be even more excited to have gotten those officials to promise to vote against any increase in the estate tax, gasoline tax, or cigarette tax, as well as the creation of a carbon tax or a VAT.  But none of these things fall within the scope of the pledge, either, and it’s a shame that Grover and his spokespeople have shown no interest in being truthful on this point.

When Indiana Governor Mike Pence was campaigning last year, a centerpiece of his campaign was a regressive 10 percent cut in the state’s already low personal income tax rate  It now appears that the Governor has convinced legislative leaders to agree to a tax cut about half that size, though it won’t be fully implemented until the end of his current term as Governor in 2017.

A new analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) shows that while this new agreement is more modest than Governor Pence’s original proposal, its impact on the distribution of Indiana taxes is similar. Namely, most of its benefits will flow to the state’s wealthiest households. ITEP analyzed the effect that this agreement would have had on Indiana residents’ tax bills if it were in effect for 2012—the year for which most households just finished filing their tax returns. When this plan takes full effect in 2017, the size of the tax cuts will be slightly larger, but their distribution will be roughly the same. Among other things, ITEP found that for 2012:

– Cutting Indiana’s personal income tax rate to 3.23 percent would reduce the tax bill of the richest 1 percent of Indiana households by an average of $1,181.

– That same cut in the state’s income tax rate would reduce the average tax bill of middle-income households by just $56. 

– Low income households fare worst of all. The recently announced agreement would amount to a tax cut for the poorest 20 percent of Indiana households of just $10 on average in 2012, and roughly one in three members of this group would receive no tax cut at all.

Read the report here.

When Congressional tax writers signaled their intention to enact a new tax break for domestic manufacturing income in 2004, lobbyists began a feeding frenzy to define both “domestic” and “manufacturing” as expansively as possible.  As a result, current beneficiaries of the tax break include mining and oil, coffee roasting (a special favor to Starbucks, which lobbied heavily for inclusion) and even Hollywood film production. The Walt Disney corporation has disclosed receiving $526 million in tax breaks from this provision over the past three years, presumably from its film production work, and even World Wrestling Entertainment has disclosed receiving tax breaks for its “domestic manufacturing” of wrestling-related films.

But CTJ has now discovered, after poring over corporate financial reports, an example that may trump them all.

Silicon Valley-based OpenTable, Inc. provides online restaurant reservations and reviews for restaurants in all fifty states and around the world, connecting customers and restaurants via the Internet and mobile apps.  While members of Congress may enjoy how OpenTable can “manufacture” a last minute seating at their favorite Beltway watering hole, it’s hard to believe the company engages in any activity that most Americans would think of as manufacturing.

And yet OpenTable discloses in its SEC filing that the domestic manufacturing tax break reduced the company’s effective corporate income tax rate substantially recently, saving it about $3 million over the last three years.  Even as a small portion of the company’s overall tax bill, that $3 million is emblematic of the scores of absurd loopholes carved out of the corporate tax code.

President Obama has repeatedly proposed scaling back the domestic manufacturing deduction to prevent big oil and gas companies from claiming it, but we have argued that the manufacturing tax break should be entirely repealed. At a minimum, Congress and the Obama Administration should take steps to ensure that the companies claiming this misguided giveaway are engaged in something that can at least plausibly be described as manufacturing.

Let’s start with the facts. Every dollar invested in the IRS’s enforcement, modernization and management system reduces the federal budget deficit by $200. Here’s another metric. Every dollar the IRS “spends for audits, liens and seizing property from tax cheats” garners ten dollars back.

Can you say “return on investment?”

Here’s another fact. The IRS’s budget has been reduced by 17 percent since 2002 (per capita and adjusted for inflation), and that includes this year’s sequester cuts. To adapt to the $594.5 million in budget cuts required by the sequester, the IRS has announced it will be forced to furlough each of its more than 89,000 employees for at least five days this year. While deficit reduction is supposed to be the goal of the sequester, cuts to the IRS will probably increase the deficit because it’s the IRS, after all, that collects tax revenue.  In fact, one expert estimated recently that furloughing 1,800 IRS “policeman” positions could cost the Treasury – that is, all of us – some $4.5 billion in lost revenue.

Denied adequate resources over the years, the IRS has not been able to keep up with its current workload, let alone expand its work. For example, a new report on IRS enforcement found that the agency actually audited 4.7 percent fewer returns in 2012 than it did in 2011. Considering that the IRS typically recovers about 14 percent of the $450 billion of unpaid taxes in a single year with its current resources, by increasing IRS resources we stand to reap billions in additional revenue from noncompliant taxpayers.

The Obama Administration proposed in its fiscal year 2014 budget to increase the IRS’s budget to $12.9 billion, about $1 billion more than its 2012 budget, with about $5.7 billion of that going to enforcement.  This increase doesn’t go nearly far enough considering the substantial decline in its budget during the past decade, but it’s a small investment we’d be smart to make.

Tuesday, the Ohio House of Representatives approved their budget bill which included an across the board 7 percent reduction in income tax rates. Though the House tax plan is less costly than the Governor’s original proposal, Policy Matters Ohio, using Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) data, makes the point that this reduction will still benefit the wealthiest Ohioans. “For the top 1 percent, the tax plan would cut $2,717 in taxes on average. For the middle 20 percent, it would amount to a $51 cut on average. For the bottom 20 percent, it would result in $3 on average.”

This week the Minnesota Senate unveiled their tax plan which, (unlike Governor Dayton’s plan and the House plan wouldn’t create a new top income tax bracket,) would raise the current top rate from 7.85 to 9.4 percent. About 6 percent of taxpayers would see their taxes go up under the Senate plan. Both houses of the legislature and the Governor are committed to tax increases and doing the hard work necessary to raise taxes in a progressive way. Senator Majority Leader Tom Bakk recently said, “Some people are probably going to lose elections because we are going to raise some taxes, but sometimes leading is not a popularity contest.”

We’d be remiss if we didn’t draw your attention to this study (PDF) by Ernst and Young for the Council on State Taxation which cautions state lawmakers about expanding their sales tax bases to include services purchased by businesses. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s failed attempt at income tax elimination included broadening the sales tax base to include a variety of services, including business-to-business services. Ironically, Ernst and Young was hired by the Governor to consult about his plan. Toward the end of the tax debate there, the AP pointed out the disparity between the Governor’s consultants’ stance on taxing business-to-business services and what the Governor himself was proposing.

Rhode Island analysts are urging lawmakers to take a closer look at the $1.7 billion the state doles out in special tax breaks each year.  A new report from the Economic Progress Institute recommends rigorous evaluations of tax breaks to find out if they’re working. It then recommends attaching expiration dates to those breaks so that lawmakers are voting whether to renew them based on solid evidence about their effectiveness. These goals are also reflected in a bill (PDF) under consideration in the Rhode Island House — Representative Tanzi’s “Tax Expenditure Evaluation Act.”

We’ve criticized Virginia’s new transportation package for letting drivers off the hook when it comes to paying for the roads they use, and now the Commonwealth Institute has crunched some new numbers that make this very point: “Currently, nearly 70 percent of the state’s transportation revenue comes from driving-related sources … But under the new funding package, that share drops to around 60 percent … In the process the gas tax drops from the leading revenue source for transportation to third place; and sales tax moves into first.”

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin and legislative leaders recently announced their intention to repeal the state’s top personal income tax bracket, bringing the top rate down from 5.25 to 5.0 percent in 2015. The rate could be dropped even more by 2016 if a revenue growth target is hit. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), analyzed the initial cut down to 5.0 percent when it was proposed earlier this year, and found that its benefits would be heavily tilted in favor of the state’s wealthiest taxpayers. This is despite the fact that Oklahoma’s high-income taxpayers already pay far less (PDF) of their income in state and local taxes than any other group.

ITEP found that almost two-thirds of the tax cuts distributed under this plan would flow to the wealthiest 20 percent of Oklahomans, while the vast majority of the state’s poorest residents would receive no tax cut at all.  Moreover, while a family in the middle of the income distribution could expect about $39 in tax cuts per year, Oklahoma’s most affluent taxpayers would receive tax cuts averaging $1,870 every year.

A new statement from the Oklahoma Policy Institute provides some important context for understanding the budgetary impact of this proposal (excerpt below).

Since 2008, Oklahoma public schools have endured the third largest budget cuts in the nation. Out of control tax breaks contributed to a collapse in revenue from oil and gas drilling. We still don’t know what will be the full cost of State Question 766 or what impact federal budget cuts will have on Oklahoma’s core services.

In this situation, it’s not the time for more tax cuts that would do little to help average Oklahomans, take $237 million from schools and other core services, and make Oklahoma more vulnerable to an energy bust or economic downturn. … Yet the proposal announced today would commit us to tax cuts two years from now, when we have no way of knowing what Oklahoma’s needs or economic situation will look like.

By now you’ve probably heard that the U.S. Senate is close to approving a bill that would allow the states to collect the sales taxes already owed by shoppers who make purchases over the Internet.  Currently, sales tax enforcement as it relates to online shopping is a messy patchwork, with retailers only collecting the tax when they have a store, warehouse, headquarters, or other “physical presence” located in the same state as the shopper.  In all other cases, shoppers are required to pay the tax directly to the state, but few do so in practice.  The result of this arrangement is both unfair (since the same item is taxed differently depending on the type of merchant selling it) and inefficient (since shoppers are given an incentive to shop online rather than locally).

Unsurprisingly, two of the strongest proponents of a federal solution to this problem have been traditional “brick and mortar” retailers that compete with online merchants and state lawmakers struggling to balance their states’ budgets even as sales tax revenues are eroded by online shopping.  But this issue has also turned anti-tax advocates, states without sales taxes, and even online retailers against one another in surprising ways, for reasons of ideology and self interest. 

Ideological Frenemies, Norquist and Laffer

Supply-side economist Arthur Laffer recently argued in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that states should be allowed to enforce their sales taxes on online shopping as a basic matter of fairness, so that “all retailers would be treated equally under state law.”  We completely agree with this point, but Laffer makes clear that his larger aim is to shore up state sales taxes in order to make cuts to his least favorite tax—the personal income tax. It’s no secret that Laffer wants states to shift toward a tax system that leans heavily on regressive sales taxes, but it’s harder to advocate for such a shift if the tax can be easily avoided by shopping online.

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform stands in direct opposition to Laffer on this issue.  Norquist has been “making the case on the House side of either seriously amending it or even stopping” federal efforts to allow for online sales tax enforcement.  But Norquist reveals his fundamental misunderstanding of the issue when he argues that out-of-state retailers should be free from having to collect sales taxes because “you should only be taxing people who can vote for you or against you.”  In reality, retailers aren’t being taxed at all—they’re simply being required to do their part in making sure their customers are paying the sales taxes already owed on their purchases.

Delaware vs. The Other No-Sales-Tax States

Four states levy no broad-based sales tax at either the state or local level: Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon and Senators from these last three states are generally not interested to helping other states enforce their sales tax laws. After all, why vote for a “new tax” if there’s no direct benefit to their own states’ coffers?

But Delaware’s senators see the issue differently, as both Sen. Carper and Sen. Coons voted in favor of the bill.  In fact, Carper introduced his own bill for collecting tax on e-purchases years ago, explaining it this way: “The Internet is undermining Delaware’s unique status” because “part of Delaware’s attraction to tourists is that people can come and shop until they drop and never have to pay a dime of sales tax.”

Amazon vs. Other Internet Retailers

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that online retailers as a group have opposed legal requirements that their customers pay sales taxes on their purchases since it means these e-retailers would have to charge and collect that tax.  Some companies, however, like Netflix, have long collected (PDF) those sales taxes, even without a legal requirement to do so. But most have clung to online sales tax evasion as a way to undercut traditional retailers by up to 10 percent (or more, depending on the sales tax rate levied where the buyer is located).

One recent exception is eBay, which appears to have seen the writing on the wall and has pivoted from opposing the bill to watering it down – and it’s deploying its 40 million users as an army of online lobbyists to that end.

But it is Amazon that stands apart from other online retailers in fully supporting a federal solution to the patchwork of state laws and the growing number of deals it has finally had to strike with states. The company’s reason is likely two-fold.

First, Amazon has a “physical presence” in a growing number of states and plans to continue its expansion in order to make next-day-delivery a reality for more of its customers. As a result, Amazon will be legally required to remit sales taxes in more states in the future and will find itself at a competitive disadvantage if other online retailers remain free from sales tax collection requirements.  Second, Amazon processes a large number of sales for other merchants through its website and collects sales taxes on behalf of some of them – for a fee.  Amazon’s sales tax collection services could become much more lucrative in the future if more of the merchants it partners with are required to collect sales taxes.

This week Missouri is offering a sales tax holiday on energy efficient appliances. Not only are these holidays costly for state budgets, they are poorly targeted. That is, it’s generally wealthier folks who have the cash flow flexibility to time their purchases to take advantage of these holidays, when it’s poorer residents who feel the brunt of sales taxes in the first place. To learn more about why these holidays aren’t worth celebrating, check out The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s (ITEP) policy brief here (PDF).

Here’s a great investigative piece from the Columbus Post Dispatch about the nearly $8 billion in tax code entitlements (aka tax expenditures) Ohio currently offers. The state needs to closely study these tax expenditures and determine if they are actually producing the economic benefits promised. Before debating extreme income tax rate reductions, Ohio lawmakers should also take a look at this ITEP primer on what a thoughtful, productive discussion of state tax expenditures looks like.

In this Kansas City Star article, ITEP’s Executive Director, Matt Gardner, talks about the fate of many radical tax plans this year in the states. “The speed with which these plans have fallen apart is as remarkable a trend as the speed with which they emerged,” he says. Kansas and its budget crisis have become a cautionary tale for other states considering tax cuts, but even the latest plans passed by the Kansas House and Senate are radical and could eventually lead to the complete elimination of the personal income tax.

Criticism of the tax cuts enacted in Kansas last year continues to mount.  We already wrote about Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma’s caution that his state might become another Kansas, but now a number of media outlets have picked up on the fact that both the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Tax Foundation called that Kansas tax cuts the “worst” (ouch!) state tax changes enacted in 2012.

Watch out, North Carolinians! It appears that Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is coming to town to the tune of $500,000 to pay for town hall meetings, “grassroots” advocacy and advertising all to support the dismantling of the state’s tax structure. Let’s hope the facts can defeat AFP’s cash.

Democratic Senator Max Baucus of Montana, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee which oversees tax legislation, announced today that he is retiring when his term closes at the end of 2014. Many people are asking how this will affect the tax reform that he hopes to shepherd through his committee. Last week, CTJ published an op-ed criticizing Baucus’s approach to tax reform.

Democratic and Republican tax-writers are holding bipartisan talks to craft a tax reform bill, even though there is no agreement between the parties on what the basic goals of such reform ought to be. One party recognizes a need for more revenue while another has pledged to not raise more revenue. This would be like holding bipartisan talks on immigration reform — if one party supported a path to citizenship while the other party pledged to round up all undocumented immigrants and deport them without exceptions…

A recent profile of Baucus’s efforts informs us that “Baucus declined say whether he views tax reform as a way to raise revenue, although he did not rule it out. Instead, he said, that divisive question should be left unanswered until committee members have a chance to study areas of reform where they are more likely to agree.”

Read the op-ed.

Read CTJ’s response to the Tax Foundation’s claim that the U.S. has a high corporate tax rate.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont recently appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and disputed the claim by the Tax Foundation that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax in the world. Senator Sanders is right, the Tax Foundation is wrong.

CTJ explains that the effective corporate tax rate (the share of profits that corporations pay in taxes) is what matters, and the effective tax rate for U.S. corporations is quite low. The Tax Foundation relies on flawed studies to argue otherwise. For example, one study cited by the Tax Foundation excludes corporations paying a negative tax rate — in other words, excludes corporate tax dodgers. Obviously this will result in a higher estimated effective tax rate.

Read CTJ’s full response.