Author: tarek

Former Texas deputy comptroller, Billy Hamilton, explains why extreme proposals to repeal the property tax are a bad idea.  Among the reasons he cites: out-of-state property owners would get a massive tax cut, localities would lose control of their own finances, and the sales tax increase needed to fund repeal would be so large as to be both bad policy and bad politics.

Iowa filmmakers that benefited handsomely from the state’s now-suspended film tax incentive program have been rebuffed by the state’s Supreme Court, which rejected their claim that if their company financials were publicly released, it would cause them hardship. The Des Moines Register editorialized in favor of the decision, saying that: “Businesses that ask for the government to subsidize their ventures are in effect asking the taxpayers to share in the risk.  Those taxpayers have an interest in knowing if their investment is being spent properly.  Businesses should accept that as part of the deal, or they should look elsewhere for business partners.”

This weekend back-to-school shoppers in twelve states are gearing up for a political gimmick – a break from paying sales taxes known as sales tax holidays. This South Carolina editorial reminds policymakers and voters that these holidays aren’t a real solution to regressive taxes, “Lawmakers should get the state’s sales tax house in order, not throw us a couple of short-term holidays.”

For someone who’s not interested in a high profile job like Vice President, Florida Senator Marco Rubio sure knows where the limelight shines. Earlier this week he introduced legislation that would create a new federal income tax break for the cash bonuses received by U.S. Olympic medalists. (It turns out that the United States Olympic Committee gives gold medal winners $25,000 cash bonuses, with smaller awards for silver or bronze.) With no apparent irony, Rubio issued a press release noting that the “tax code is a complicated and burdensome mess,” and then proposed a new tax break that would make it even more so.

How, at a time when Congress faces vital decisions over the basic structure of our tax system, did the Senator identify the tax treatment of Olympic bonuses as a pressing issue? It turns out that Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) put out a press release saying that medal winners will face a tax bill of almost $9,000 if they win a gold medal.  Rubio’s spokesperson said that’s what caught Rubio’s eye.

But the ATR numbers are complete bunk. Their calculations assume that a medal winner will pay tax at the 35 percent top rate, but less than one percent of Americans pay anything, even a dollar of income, at the 35 percent rate. (Politifact agrees, and rates ATR’s claim “mostly false.”) We can only think of a dozen or so gold medal winners who might, in fact, pay 35 percent on their gold medals: they are members of the US basketball team, and they are all millionaires. 

What Senator Rubio and his counterparts in the House are proposing is to add yet another exemption to our tax code, which is, of course, the main reason it’s so complicated – Congress insists on flagging more and more special types of income for special tax breaks.

If Rubio’s bill is really an honest attempt at tax reform rather than an attempt to capitalize on Olympics-related publicity, it’s actually doubly sad: not only did he get duped by misleading numbers from Grover Norquist, he also just doesn’t seem to understand that the “complicated and burdensome tax code” he bemoans will become even more so if his bill passes!

If, on the other hand, Rubio’s bill is the cynical grandstanding that it appears to be, it’s a real shame. As we’ve said elsewhere, our revenues are dwindling, the rich pay less and less in taxes every year and the tax code is a Rube Goldberg-ian mess. But it seems Senator Rubio is more interested in compounding these problems than solving them.

Photo from Politifact.com

Today, the Senate Finance Committee approved a package of provisions often called the “tax extenders” because they extend several tax cuts, mostly benefiting businesses. A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice identifies two of the “tax extenders” as particular problems, despite having arcane names that are unknown outside of the corporate tax world: the “active financing exception” and the “CFC look-thru rules.”

Read the report: Don’t Renew the Offshore Tax Loopholes: Congress Should Kill the “Extenders” that Let G.E., Apple, and Google Send Their Profits Offshore

These two temporary rules in the tax code — which allow U.S. multinational corporations to park their earnings offshore and avoid paying tax on them — expired at the end of 2011. If Congress refuses to extend these expired provisions, many U.S. companies will have much less incentive to send their profits (and possibly jobs) offshore.

►  The active financing exception and the CFC look-thru rules make it easy for U.S. multinational companies to move income to offshore tax havens and avoid paying U.S. tax.

►  Income shifting by multinational corporations using offshore tax havens, including transactions facilitated by these two rules, cost the U.S. Treasury an estimated $90 billion per year in lost tax revenue.

Read the report for more details.

Federal efforts to fight consumer sales tax evasion facilitated by the likes of Amazon.com continue to make news.  Last week, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing in which lawmakers appeared to agree on the need to empower states to enforce their sales tax laws even on purchases made over the Internet.  Specifically, the Committee heard testimony on legislation that would require out-of-state Internet retailers to collect and remit the sales taxes owed by their customers—just as big box stores and Mom & Pop shops alike have done for decades.

This week the Senate followed the House’s lead, with the Senate Commerce Committee holding a hearing to discuss similar legislation.  Influential state lawmakers, as well as many major retailers are backing these federal efforts.  And while it’s too early to guarantee any particular outcome (especially in an election year), it’s also clear that the federal government is taking this issue more seriously than ever.

Many lawmakers, like Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), are “completely sold on the fairness issue” of collecting sales taxes on all purchases regardless of whether they’re made online or at the local shopping mall.  But there are some holdouts who think the states should be forced to sit idly by while their sales tax bases shrink, their local businesses suffer, and the sales tax increasingly becomes an optional payment for anybody with an Internet connection.  Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) falls squarely into this category.

This week, DeMint authored a Wall Street Journal opinion piece arguing that taxing online shopping would amount to an attack by “tax-hungry politicians” on “the essence of our democracy.”  As you might expect from such rhetoric, much of the piece is far-fetched.  Among other things, DeMint fears that improving the enforcement of state sales tax laws could lead to “talk of a streamlined national sales tax … with Washington taking a cut and destroying our nation’s healthy tradition of state tax competition.”  And throughout the piece, DeMint misses the mark by suggesting that states are trying to directly tax Amazon, eBay, and other online retailers, when in reality they’re only trying to involve those retailers in the collection of sales taxes already owed (but rarely paid) by their customers.

For more information, see this policy brief from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), as well as some of our previous coverage of this issue.

New reports from Americans for Tax Fairness, Citizens for Tax Justice and the National Women’s Law Center demonstrate how public investments and taxpayers in each state would be affected by the competing approaches to the Bush tax cuts.

Americans for Tax Fairness is a coalition that includes Citizens for Tax Justice and other good government groups, think-tanks, small business associaitions and labor unions that have come together to raise awareness about the need for revenue to address the budget deficit and make vital public investments. We believe the first step is allowing the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of taxpayers to expire.

Read the State Reports from Americans for Tax Fairness

For Immediate Release: August 1, 2012

Sales Tax Holidays No Substitute for Tax Reform

Year Round Tax Breaks for the Rich Dwarf Annual Tax Holidays for Consumers

Washington, DC – Eighteen states will host sales tax holiday weekends in August this year at a cost somewhere north of $200 million. They are billed as offering relief to ordinary taxpayers, yet 11 of these 18 states also offer one or more special tax breaks for their most affluent residents which add up to an annual cost of more than $3 billion. Moreover, only one of these states (OK) provides a year-round sales tax credit for low income families to purchase necessities (a proven poverty-fighting tool).

“Year-round, state tax codes are notoriously hard on families near the bottom of the income ladder,” said Matthew Gardner, Executive Director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “and a three-day holiday once a year doesn’t change that.  The real beneficiaries of the sales tax holidays are the politicians who get to act like they care about working families but don’t do any of the political heavy lifting real tax reform requires.”

Alabama offers a deduction for federal income taxes paid, at a cost of $516 million.
Arkansas offers a capital gains tax break that costs $53 million annually.
Florida offers a tax break on a particular kind of business income used by wealthy individuals that costs the state $1 billion a year..
Georgia allows a deduction for state personal income tax paid at a cost of $400 million a year.
Iowa offers the deduction for federal income tax paid at a cost of $642 Million.
Louisiana offers the federal personal income tax deduction at a cost to its treasury of $643 million a year.
Missouri allows the federal income tax deduction at a cost of $394 million.
New Mexico allows taxpayers a break on capital gains income at a cost of $48 million;
Oklahoma offers a deduction for state income tax paid at a cost of $100 million a year.
South Carolina allows a tax break on capital gains income which costs $115 million a year.
Tennessee’s estate tax repeal will cost $94 million a year in 2016 (after full phase in).

Even the other seven states that don’t have a gratuitous tax break for their wealthiest residents have overall tax systems that are regressive because they demand a much larger share from lower income households. “Governors who are serious about giving a break to working families in their states have sensible options for reforming their tax systems,” said Gardner. “None of them would break the bank but any of them, from the Earned Income Tax Credit to targeted sales tax credits, would make all the difference in a household budget.”

The number of states offering sales tax holidays is declining, and for good reasons. They are expensive and complicated to run for state revenue departments and for retailers. They exclude citizens who may need tax relief but have no back-to-school needs, such as seniors. They exclude consumers who lack the cash flow flexibility to time their shopping to a precise weekend. They also exclude retailers who sell products not on the somewhat arbitrary lists states devise. (E.G., New Mexico exempts prom dresses but not hair barrettes. Maryland exempts bridal veils but not tuxedos during its holiday, etc.)  ITEP’s two-page policy brief on sales tax holidays is at http://www.itep.org/pdf/pb17hol.pdf.

Founded in 1980, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) is a non-profit, non-partisan research organization, based in Washington, DC, that focuses on federal and state tax policy. ITEP’s mission is to inform policymakers and the public of the effects of current and proposed tax policies on tax fairness, government budgets, and sound economic policy. ITEP’s full body of research is available at www.itepnet.org.

North Carolina is home to one of the great examples of how economies flourish when government gets involved: the Research Triangle Park. It was developed in the 1950s by a public-private partnership, depended heavily on more than one governor’s leadership and on the proximity of three major research universities (two of which are public), and succeeded in fundraising after it was granted nonprofit status from the state. It was designed with the goal of helping North Carolina transition into the modern economy, and it worked.

But a candidate for governor named Pat McCrory wants to turn the state into a low-tax, low-service loser that could never undertake such a visionary project. While McCrory takes full credit for overseeing Charlotte’s economic boom while he ran that city as its Mayor, if he follows through on his anti-government campaign promises, North Carolina won’t have the resources to usher in the economic boom McCrory says he can deliver statewide.

McCrory has made cutting taxes the centerpiece of his campaign for governor. He has pledged to cut the corporate income tax, the individual income tax and the estate tax if elected. Sadly, yet predictably, this candidate has also refused to release any details about the structure of these proposals, including their bottom-line cost in terms of revenues. What we do know, though, is that he’d have a friendly audience in the state capital, where GOP leaders – who control the legislature – have already proposed the outright elimination of personal and corporate income taxes. 

As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) has explained, corporate and personal income taxes are among the few tools state policymakers have for minimizing the stark regressivity of state tax systems, including North Carolina’s. An analysis (PDF) of all state and local taxes paid by Tar Heel State residents shows that the highest earners pay a far smaller portion of their income in taxes than do middle- and low-income families. McCrory’s proposed tax cuts would only exacerbate this gap. Indeed, the candidate has held up Tennessee and Florida as his models for state tax policy—two states that also happen to be among the five most regressive state tax systems in the country.

But McCrory doesn’t talk about tax fairness. Instead, he presents the party line and says tax cuts are a means to support North Carolina’s “economic development brand,” which he claims is diminished by high taxes.

Here are three reasons he is wrong.

One, while the state’s unemployment rate is stubbornly high (9.4 percent), the cause is the state’s dependence on waning manufacturing jobs, not its tax policy. The unemployment rate is just as high across the border in manufacturing-dependent South Carolina despite that state’s lower business and personal income tax rates. Two, as the News & Observer points out, North Carolina is already regarded as being very business-friendly in national surveys of executives and industrial recruiters. And three, as research from ITEP has shown, supply side arguments for cutting taxes to grow the economy simply do not hold up in the face of evidence.

Instead of making the state more enticing to business, McCrory’s race-to-the-bottom strategy on tax policy would threaten the public services that make the state so appealing. North Carolina’s public investments are already suffering from acute budget cuts. The legislature recently dealt a blow to the University of North Carolina system and the community college system, as well as to job recruitment and economic development programs. McCrory’s tax cuts would make additional cuts to such critical public programs all but inevitable, exacerbating the economic slump that is, of course, a nationwide phenomenon.

Any political candidate who’s serious about learning how taxes affect the economy should read ITEP’s Four Tax Ideas for Jobs-Focused Governors.  This short report explains that the way you make taxes support economic growth is not by cutting them, but rather by wisely deploying them as revenues in the public interest.

Cartoon by John Cole, NC Policy Watch

This year, 18 states will encourage consumers to buy back-to-school items tax free. These sales tax holidays get lots of promotion and lots of press, but the reality is that sales tax holidays are no kind of deal for most taxpayers. State tax systems are known for the way they demand more from lower income families, and a three-day break barely makes a dent in that.

The reality is that sales tax holidays offer too little relief to the families that need it most. They require that you do your shopping during a brief window of time, which requires a financial flexibility that more affluent families have but those on tight budgets often don’t. On the retailers’ side, some stores have been shown to raise their prices during the tax holiday and others report it’s no net gain for them since they end up selling products they would have sold some other weekend anyway.

Sales tax holidays are political side-shows that might distract taxpayers, but they don’t solve any problems. Responsible lawmakers should instead implement fundamental reforms.  For example, year-round sales tax credits that can be claimed on tax forms offer a stable, reliable and more substantial break for working families. States have multiple options (PDF) for using the tax code to genuinely help families make ends meet.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has updated its Sales Tax Holiday policy brief to coincide with the back-to-school shopping season. You can read it here.

To celebrate the five year anniversary of the first “Rich States, Poor States,” an Arthur Laffer/ALEC publication that ranks states based on how closely their tax and budget policies adhere to conservative economic principles, the Iowa Policy Project put it to the retrospect test and found it lacking.  They write, “The ALEC Outlook Ranking fails to predict economic performance. In fact, the less a state followed ALEC’s prescriptions, the better it did in terms of job growth, and the better it did on change in poverty rate and median income.”

New York just decided to throw even more taxpayer money at filmmakers, despite ample evidence that these giveaways don’t do much for long-term job growth or economic performance.

This Topeka Capital-Journal letter-to-the-editor from a registered Republican laments that the tax plan signed into law by Governor Brownback “will increase Kansas income tax on the poor and reduce taxes predominately for the wealthy.”

On Tuesday, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam told the House Judiciary Committee that states need to be able to collect sales taxes on internet purchases. He said plainly, “This discussion isn’t about raising taxes or adding new taxes.” Instead it’s about “collecting taxes already owed.” We couldn’t agree more.

Photo of Art Laffer via  Republican Conference Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

According to one of the latest counts, officials in 30 state governments have indicated that their state plans to opt out of the Medicaid expansion that was enacted as part of health care reform, or are at least leaning in that direction. The reason many conservative state officials, like Florida Governor Rick Scott, cite for opting out (putting aside general criticism of the evils of “Obamacare”) is that participating would “strain state budgets.”

In reality, the Medicaid expansion is the deal of a lifetime for state governments. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the federal government will take on nearly 93 percent of the costs of the Medicaid expansion over its first nine years. On average, that means that states will receive over 9 additional Medicaid dollars for every 1 they spend themselves.

While this may already sound like a great deal, many states may end up actually saving money by embracing the Medicaid expansion. An in-depth study by state officials in Arkansas found that it would actually cost the state $3.4 million more to not participate in the Medicaid expansion. Similarly, a study by the Urban Institute found that health care reform overall will save state budgets between $92-129 billion dollars from 2014-2019.

In some cases, the failure of the state government to accept the Medicaid expansion may also have the side effect of putting even more strain on local budgets. Last year in Texas, for example, the decision by the Republican Governor Rick Perry and state legislators to cut Medicaid forced the El Paso County Hospital District to raise property taxes to make up for the increasing costs from nearly uninsured patients. This dynamic explains why many local officials in Texas support the Medicaid expansion, even as Governor Perry is one of its most outspoken critics.  

While many conservative governors are claiming that the Medicaid expansion would cost too much, they are at the same time continuing budget-busting tax breaks for the wealthy. Iowa Republican Governor Terry Branstad for instance has said that the Medicaid expansion would be “unaffordable” and “unsustainable”, even though its estimated cost would be less than 4 percent of the revenue that could be raised by ending the Iowa’s bizarre and regressive deduction for federal income tax payments.

Considering the generous deal that governors are being offered, many commentators believe that most if not all the states will ultimately take the deal, despite the recent election year grandstanding. The CBO is not so sure. On Tuesday, CBO released its latest cost projections of health care reform, which predicts that many states will choose to opt out of the Medicaid expansion resulting in 3 million fewer people insured.

Photo of Gov. Terry Branstad via Iowa Politics Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0