We retired Tax Justice Blog in April 2017. For new content on issues related to tax justice, go to www.justtaxesblog.org
On Tuesday, House Republicans 
released a proposal, H.R. 6169, that would relax some of Congress’s normal procedural rules in order to enact an overhaul of the tax code — so long as the tax overhaul meets the objectives laid out in the House budget plan authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan.
H.R. 6169 was introduced on Tuesday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp and House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier and lays out several components that the tax overhaul legislation must have in order to be passed through the easier legislative procedure. All of these components are identical to those laid out in the Ryan Plan
The required components of the tax overhaul, which are also those laid out in the Ryan Plan, include:
- replacing the personal income tax rates with just two rates, 10 percent and 25 percent (or less)
- repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)
- reducing the statutory corporate income tax rate to 25 percent (or less)
- adoption of a “territorial” tax system (exempting offshore profits of corporations from U.S. taxes)
- collecting revenue equal to between 18 and 19 percent of GDP
The “findings” section of the bill states that revenue will “rise to 21.2 percent of GDP under current law,” meaning its proposed revenue target of between 18 and 19 percent of GDP is an explicit cut in revenue.
A Huge Tax Break for Millionaires No Matter How It’s Structured
CTJ issued a report in March concluding that Ryan’s proposed changes to the personal income tax would provide taxpayers with income exceeding $1 million in 2014 an income tax cut of at least $187,000 on average
Like Ryan’s plan, the bill introduced by Camp and Dreier does not say which tax loopholes and tax subsidies should be closed to ensure that the tax system still collects revenue equaling between 18 and 19 percent of GDP even after the plan’s steep rate reductions and the repeal of the AMT are in effect.
We estimated that even if those with incomes exceeding $1 million were forced to give up all the tax expenditures Ryan could possibly want to take away from them — all their itemized deductions, tax credits, the exclusion for employer-provided health insurance and the deduction for health insurance for the self-employed — even then the net result for these taxpayers would be an average income tax cut of $187,000 in 2014. That’s because the income tax rate reductions Ryan proposed are so deep that they would far outweigh the loss of all these tax loopholes and tax subsidies.
Increasing Incentives for Corporate Tax Dodging
The CTJ report on the Ryan plan also explains that reducing the statutory corporate income tax to 25 percent would likely lose revenue when we should be raising revenue from corporate tax reform. (CTJ’s major study last year of most of the profitable Fortune 500 corporations found that their effective tax rate, the percentage of profits they actually pay in taxes, was just 18.5 percent, far less than the statutory rate of 35 percent that Ryan and Camp complain about.)
CTJ’s report on the Ryan Plan also explains that a territorial tax system — exempting offshore profits of corporations from U.S. taxes — can only increase the incentives that U.S. corporations already have to disguise their U.S. profits as “foreign” profits through shady transactions that shift their earnings (on paper) into offshore tax havens.
Photo of Rep. Dave Camp via Michael Jolley Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0