Author: Alex Welch

March 17, 2009 02:13 PM | Permalink |

As Senate Finance Committee Meets to Consider Offshore Tax Evasion, Citizens for Tax Justice Joins Other Organizations in Support of Legislation to Crack Down on Tax Havens

Citizens for Tax Justice has joined over 20 other national organizations signing a letter to Congress in support of legislation introduced by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) and Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) to crack down on offshore tax evasion.

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March 17, 2009 02:07 PM | Permalink |

A Closer Look at Programs Hidden Within the Tax Code Would Enhance Government Transparency

In his recently released budget blueprint, President Obama promised to overhaul the way the federal government judges its own effectiveness.1 In addition to opening the evaluation process to input from the public, the Congress, and outside experts, the President pledged that the evaluation would take a more comprehensive perspective. Specifically, President Obama declared that “programs will not be measured in isolation, but assessed in the context of other programs that are serving the same population or meeting the same goals.” In response, Citizens for Tax Justice Senior Analyst, Carl Davis, stated today, “If the President’s goal is for these reviews to be truly comprehensive, the evaluation process will need to be expanded to include the hundreds of billions of dollars devoted to programs we administer through the tax code — commonly known as tax expenditures.”

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February 13, 2009 12:27 PM | Permalink |

Impact of Selected Tax Cuts in Final Economic Stimulus Bill, State-by-State

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Source: ITEP Tax Model, February 13, 2009

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February 11, 2009 03:29 PM | Permalink |

How Would the Stimulus Proposals Affect
Families With Children In Your State?

State Fact Sheets and Analysis from Citizens for Tax Justice

Updated February 11, 2009

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February 11, 2009 12:29 PM | Permalink |

The economic stimulus bill that the Senate approved yesterday includes several tax cuts that
are not in the stimulus bill approved by the House of Representatives two weeks ago. Among
these, there is one that stands out as particularly expensive and unlikely to stimulate the
economy — the Senate’s proposed one-year reduction (or “patch”) for the Alternative
Minimum Tax (AMT).

This provision, which costs $70 billion, would prevent the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)
from expanding its reach to tens of millions of families who have previously been unaffected
by it, for one year. This might sound like a nice idea for some taxpayers, but as economic
stimulus it would be ineffective because almost 70 percent of the benefits would go to the
best-off ten percent of taxpayers.

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February 10, 2009 03:33 PM | Permalink |

Senate and House Per-Child Tax Credit Plans, Feb. 10, 2009

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February 10, 2009 02:31 PM | Permalink |

The economic stimulus bill that the Senate approved today includes several tax cuts that are not in the stimulus bill approved by the House of Representatives two weeks ago and which should be excluded from the final bill that goes to the President.

The bill approved by the House of Representatives two weeks ago has a total cost of about $819 billion, while the cost of the Senate bill had grown last week to about $940 billion. A group of self-styled centrist Senators then put forth a compromise that took exactly the wrong approach to cutting down the costs: They mostly removed government spending that economists believe will stimulate the economy — like aid to state governments, school construction, food stamps — while they left in most of the regressive tax cuts that Senators have added to the bill.

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January 30, 2009 02:15 PM | Permalink |

“Congress can swear on two stacks of Bibles that it’ll never do it again, but they’ve lost their virginity.” H. David Rosenbloom, Director, NYU School of Law International Tax Program, commenting to the New York Times on July 24, 2007 on the “repatriation” provision in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004.

In 2004, Congress did something that, it claimed, it would never do again. It allowed corporations that had shifted their profits offshore to “repatriate” those profits—that is, bring them back into the United States—and pay corporate income taxes on those profits at a almost nominal 5.25% rate instead of the normal 35% rate for corporate income.

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January 29, 2009 03:35 PM | Permalink |

Some members of Congress lately are fond of saying that refundable tax credit (credits against tax that can result in the IRS actually sending money to taxpayers instead of taking money from them) amount to “tax cuts for people who don’t pay taxes.” This is intentionally misleading. Essentially all working families pay federal payroll taxes (and excise taxes like the federal gasoline tax and tobacco taxes), but many do not earn enough to owe any federal income tax. Congress and presidents since Jimmy Carter (including President George W. Bush) created or expanded refundable income tax credits, which can result in families of modest income having negative income tax liability.

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January 28, 2009 12:04 PM | Permalink |

National and State-by-State Fact Sheets in Appendix

On Friday, January 23, House Republican Leader John Boehner (OH) and Republican Whip Eric Cantor (VA) presented their “Economic Recovery Plan” to President Obama. The Republican plan is based on income tax cuts for relatively well-off families, and business tax cuts. As a result, it is unlikely to provide the needed boost to consumption that economists believe can come from either direct government spending or putting money in the hands of working class people who are likely to spend it quickly.

The House GOP plan proposes to reduce the two lowest individual income tax rates from 15% to 10% and from 10% to 5%. To get the maximum tax cut of about $3,400 from this rate reduction, taxpayers would have to have enough taxable income to reach the start of the third income tax bracket. For example, a married couple with two children would typically need to earn more than $100,000. 1 That’s considerably more than most people earn. In fact, only one in five of all taxpayers hasenough income to reach the third income tax bracket and receive the full benefit of the proposed tax rate reduction

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