Tag: Archive

November 30, 2006 04:04 PM | Permalink |

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the idea of raising or eliminating the cap on earnings subject to the Social Security payroll tax and self-employment tax. This paper evaluates the effects of such a change and examines some of the issues it raises.

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November 16, 2006 01:46 PM | Permalink |

Control over the House and Senate will change when the new Congress begins in January, but one thing remains the same: members of Congress of both parties still love to shower corporate interests with targeted tax breaks to encourage campaign donations. A package of extensions for a group of tax breaks, known on Capitol Hill as the “tax extenders,” is attracting little notice among the general public but a fair amount of consternation among members of Congress. The package, with an estimated cost of over $38 billion, includes corporate tax breaks that are usually renewed every two years or so rather than enacted permanently — after all, corporate interests would have no incentive to make campaign contributions if they didn’t have to return to the Hill every year to grovel.

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October 20, 2006 04:05 PM | Permalink |

On October 11, the Bush administration announced that the fiscal 2006 budget deficit is $248 billion. In reality the budget deficit is much larger. Including the $186 billion borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund, it is $434 billion for fiscal 2006. That brings total federal borrowing over the past five years to $2,413 billion.

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October 16, 2006 03:39 PM | Permalink |

Over the past six years, Congress and President Bush have made major changes to the federal tax system, dramatically affecting tax fairness, revenues and budget deficits. This Congressional Tax Report Card looks at the five key tax votes in the House and Senate that have produced these changes, plus one additional vote on an important recent tax bill that Congress narrowly rejected.

The Tax Report Card details how members of Congress voted on these six bills, and grades each member on the combination of his or her votes. The grading system is based on the combination of two criteria: tax fairness and fiscal responsibility — principles that all sides of the political debate at least pretend to honor.

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October 13, 2006 03:41 PM | Permalink |

After half a dozen major tax cuts in the first six years of the Bush administration—many of which have different phase-in dates, and almost all of which sunset completely after 2010—you need a scorecard to keep track of which cuts take effect each year. Here’s your scorecard: a year-by-year list of federal tax cuts (and hikes) taking effect between 2001 and 2010.

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October 10, 2006 03:43 PM | Permalink |

State Fact Sheets and Analysis

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August 30, 2006 01:47 PM | Permalink |

A fellow from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the big accounting, lobbying and corporate public relations firm, called me the other day to talk about a PwC project called the “Total Tax Contribution framework,” which he described as “an effort to enhance transparency in corporate tax reporting.” He buttered me up by citing my long history in exposing corporate tax avoidance, and then asked if he and some of his colleagues could sit down with me for an hour or so and talk about the project. To further interest me, he added that the idea had already been tried out in the United Kingdom, and had proven to be very popular there.

I was wary. So I asked him to e-mail me some background materials. The next day, I received two colorful brochures, designed to pitch the “Total Tax Contribution framework” to PwC’s corporate clients. A quick look confirmed my suspicions. Amazingly, PwC is trying to get corporations to pretend their tax bills are bigger than they really are, by counting not just their actual taxes, but also taxes they don’t pay, such as those paid by their customers, workers, suppliers and so forth!

PwC’s materials suggest that such misinformation might be usefully employed by companies in things such as phonybaloney “corporate responsibility reports” and “PR and marketing campaigns.” The brochures offer PwC’s help in doing so, presumably for a hefty fee.

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August 4, 2006 02:06 PM | Permalink |

Citizens for Tax Justice congratulates the U.S. Senate on its decision to reject the effort to hand a new $62 billion a year estate tax break to a small group of America’s wealthiest families. A sufficient minority of Senators has said “no” to another expensive tax giveaway to the rich at a time when our nation is sliding deeper and deeper into debt.

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August 1, 2006 04:07 PM | Permalink |

The latest budget-busting tax cut passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on July 28 is likely to be considered by the Senate this week. The bill, HR 4, would make permanent so-called “savings incentives” tax breaks that benefit higher-income families who need the least help in trying to save—and reduce federal revenues by billions of dollars at a time when deficits remain worryingly large.

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July 14, 2006 02:24 PM | Permalink |

What is the United States trying to do when it comes to taxing multinational corporations?

Companies that do business only in the United States have to pay federal income taxes on their profits (at least as the tax code defines “profits”). We want multinational corporations—both American-owned and foreign-owned—to pay taxes on their U.S. earnings, too. That’s the main goal.

In addition, at least some of the time, we try to make American-based multinationals pay U.S. taxes on the profits they earn in low-tax foreign tax havens. The purposes here are both to raise revenue and to avoid giving American companies a tax incentive to move their operations—or artificially shift profits—to low-tax foreign countries.

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