Happy Halloween to our readers!

In honor of the spookiest of all holidays, we want to start by sharing this recent Wall Street Journal piece called Meet One of the Super-PAC Men which profiles Missouri’s Rex Sinquefield, the masked financier behind of one of the scariest state tax policy proposals around -- eliminating Missouri’s income tax and replacing it with increased sales tax revenues.

Word is that fracking taxes, income tax cuts, bank “tax reform” and possibly privatizing the Ohio Turnpike could all be priorities for Ohio’s ghoulishly anti-tax governor, John Kasich. Given the Governor’s track record of supporting tax cuts above all else, we are more than a little afraid about what is to come in the Buckeye State.

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback recently proposed a “property tax transparency” plan which will prevent automatic property tax increases when property values rise. But this proposal leaves local governments who depend on the property tax at the mercy of a zombie math formula. Brownback’s plan should spook all the citizens who depend on local government services.

This one will send a shudder up the spines of supply-siders who want to cut taxes on businesses and the wealthy under the guise of economic development.  The Wisconsin Budget Project is reporting on a national poll which found that a “majority of small-business owners believe that raising taxes on the top 2% of taxpayers is the right thing to do.” On this issue, anyway, it looks as though the good goblins are giving Grover a run for his money!

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has proposed to make permanent the Bush tax cuts without offsetting the costs and also enact new, additional tax cuts that would be paid for by limiting tax expenditures (special breaks or loopholes in the tax code). Romney recently suggested that his new tax cuts could be paid for by limiting itemized deductions to $25,000 per tax return, which we estimate would offset just 36 percent of their costs. The percentage of Romney’s new tax cuts offset by this limit on itemized deductions would vary dramatically by state.

Read the report.

There’s been a lot of good research these past few years debunking claims that state taxes – particularly income taxes on the rich – send wealthy taxpayers fleeing from “unfriendly” states.  CTJ’s partner organization, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), took a lead role in disproving those claims in Maryland (PDF), New York, and Oregon (PDF), for example. CTJ has also been covering the controversy in several states and in the media.

Some particularly thorough research on this topic has come out of New Jersey, where researchers at Princeton and Stanford Universities were granted access to actual tax return data, which is not available to the public, in order to investigate the issue in more detail. The resulting paper (PDF) found a “negligible” impact of higher taxes on the migration patterns of the wealthy.

And now, for the further benefit of lawmakers seeking to become better informed about tax policy, those same Princeton and Stanford researchers were recently granted access to similar confidential taxpayer data in California. Unsurprisingly, the findings of their newest paper (PDF) were similar to those out of New Jersey: “the highest-income Californians were less likely to leave the state after the [2005] millionaire tax was passed… [and] the 1996 tax cuts on high incomes … had no consistent effect on migration.”

That’s right.  California millionaires actually became less interested in leaving the state after the tax rate on incomes over $1 million rose by one percentage point starting in 2005.

Another important finding: migration is only a very small piece of what determines the size of a state’s millionaire population.  “At the most, migration accounts for 1.2 percent of the annual changes in the millionaire population,” they explain.  The other 98.8 percent is due to yearly fluctuations in rich taxpayers’ income that moves them above or below the $1 million mark.  

This finding (which is not entirely new) defeats the very logic that anti-tax activists use to argue their “millionaire migration” case. Here’s more from the researchers:

“Most people who earn $1 million or more are having an unusually good year. Income for these individuals was notably lower in years past, and will decline in future years as well. A representative “millionaire” will only have a handful of years in the $1 million + tax bracket. The somewhat temporary nature of very-high earnings is one reason why the tax changes examined here generate no observable tax flight. It is difficult to migrate away from an unusually good year of income.”

But for every new piece of serious research on this issue, there are just as many bogus studies purporting to show the opposite.  Of particular note is a September “study” from the Manhattan Institute, recently torn apart by Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters.

Somewhat surprisingly for a right-wing organization’s study of this topic, the Manhattan Institute report actually concedes that other variables, things like population density, economic cycles, housing prices and even inadequate government spending on transportation, can motivate people to leave one state for another.  But while the Institute doesn’t claim that every ex-Californian left because of taxes, regulations, and unions, it does, predictably, assign these factors an outsized role. But their “analysis” of the impact of taxes spans just six paragraphs and is, in essence, nothing more than an evidence-free assertion that low taxes are the reason some former Californians favor states like Texas, Nevada, Arizona – even, oddly, Oregon, where income tax rates are similar to California’s.

Obviously, the guys looking at the actual tax returns have a better idea of what’s actually going on, and state lawmakers need to listen.

When most people think of major foreign policy issues facing the U.S., they rarely think of taxes and budget deficits. But during the foreign policy-focused final presidential debate on Monday night, the candidates delved into tax and budget issues – domestic ones, that is, but not those related to foreign policy. Below, we break down the most important tax policy moments of the night.

The Debt “Crisis”
Romney came out swinging saying that President Barack Obama had put the U.S. on a path “heading towards Greece” and that by the end of his second term Obama will have pushed the debt to $20 trillion. He added that a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has called the debt “the biggest national security threat we face.” There is a lot to unpack in this line of attack.

To start, even alarmist estimates, like those by the conservative Heritage Foundation, show that on its “current” path the U.S. still has twenty years before it reaches a debt-to-GDP ratio on par with Greece. More importantly, however, such projections assume that Congress and the President will extend the Bush tax cuts and reverse the spending cuts contained within the sequester; and in truth, that combination is the most serious long term debt threat U.S. faces.

It is also true that Obama’s approach to our long term debt comes up short. Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) has criticized Obama’s plan that would increase the deficit by $4.2 trillion over the next ten years by extending a full 78 percent of the Bush tax cuts. But it’s quite a thing for Romney to point fingers at Obama regarding the debt since Romney is proposing an approach far and away more reckless, one that includes about $5 trillion in additional tax cuts on top of the $5.4 trillion cost of a full extension of the Bush tax cuts over the next ten years, which he also endorses.

Compounding this, Romney has not proposed enough specific spending cuts to get anywhere close to balancing the budget. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office has found that Romney’s number one recommendation to cut the deficit during the debate, his plan to “get rid” of Obamacare, would actually increase the deficit by $210 billion over ten years. In addition, even under Romney’s running-mate Representative Paul Ryan’s draconian budget plan, the debt would still increase to $19 trillion in 2016 by Ryan’s own estimations.

Making Romney’s budget math even more fantastical (as Obama correctly pointed out) is his proposal to increase military spending by about $2 trillion over the next ten years compared to Obama’s budget proposal, and about $2.5 trillion compared to what the sequester deal would require.  

Balancing Budgets at the State Level
To support his idea that it’s possible to enact massive tax cuts while also balancing the budget at the federal level, Romney pointed to his record as governor in Massachusetts, where he said he was able to balance the budget four years in a row while still cutting taxes “19 times.” In actuality, Romney was only able to balance the budget because he took the responsible position of actually raising more, rather than less revenue as governor.

According to an analysis by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, budgets enacted under Romney raised around $700 million in additional revenue annually through higher user fees (a popular approach of raising revenue among anti-tax governors) and closing tax loopholes. This increase in revenue outweighed the cost of his 19 tax cuts, which were mostly small and included gimmicky measures like a sales tax holiday. By contrast, Romney is now proposing tax cuts that would dwarf the revenues he would raise through loophole closing.

Candidates Barely Touch on International Tax Dodging

As we predicted, the candidates barely made a passing reference to the problems facing our international tax system, even though, for example, the U.S. loses an astounding $100 to $150 billion in tax revenues each year to offshore tax havens. The only mention of international tax issues came when Obama noted that the current system “rewards companies that are shipping jobs overseas” and when he repeated the point previously made by Vice President Joe Biden that the territorial tax system Romney supports will create 800,000 jobs – but in places like China rather than the U.S.

Biden and Obama are right, and they cite this study showing that the territorial tax system (PDF) Romney proposes would even further encourage corporations to move jobs offshore and disguise their U.S. income as foreign income in order to avoid U.S. taxes. Rather than moving backwards with a territorial tax system, the U.S. should end deferral of taxes on foreign profits by U.S. corporations, which would immediately solve the issue of companies holding $1.5 trillion of income offshore to avoid taxes on the billions they owe in taxes on that income.

The Pennsylvania legislature just sent a bill to Governor Corbett that would allow most companies to keep the income tax payments they withhold from their employees as a kind of reward for having hired them. Normally, of course, those tax dollars would go to pay for the public services all Pennsylvanians, including the workers, rely on.  As Sen. Jim Ferlo argues, “All of sudden we're waylaying those employees' wages, almost akin to Jesse James robbing a bank, and we're going to put it back in the pockets of one company, in one locale, in one county, in one jobsite.”  This type of tax break is not uncommon, and it’s explained in Good Jobs First’s “Paying Taxes to the Boss.”

The Olympian editorializes against Washington State’s Initiative 1185, the newest attempt by anti-tax activist Tim Eyman to empower a small minority of legislators to block the closing of any tax loophole.  The proposal is known as a “supermajority requirement,” since it would require approval by two-thirds of each legislative chamber to enact any revenue-raising tax change.  But as the editorial explains, “A supermajority gives unprecedented and undemocratic powers to the minority in just one area: tax increases. Lawmakers who oppose a tax proposal get twice the voting power of those who support it.”

Iowa tax revenues appear to be on the rise, but instead of using that money to fill in gaps after years of “starv[ing] state government” or, say, restoring anti-poverty tax credits like the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC),  Governor Terry Branstad is pushing for proposals that will “dramatically” reduce both personal and corporate income tax rates. This is par for the course with Governor Branstad. He has a history of prioritizing the wrong tax cuts while vetoing those for working families, like an expanded state EITC.

Looking for evidence that states shouldn’t heavily depend on cigarette tax (PDF) revenues as a stable source of revenue? Check out this Clarion Ledger article which reports that “per capita consumption of cigarettes — 67.9 packs a person in 2011 — is the lowest it’s ever been in Mississippi.” Thanks to federal and state tax increases, tax revenues have actually increased, but as fewer and fewer Mississippians smoke, those cigarette tax revenues are bound to decline as well.

In a recent survey, conducted by the Docking Institute of Public Affairs at Fort Hays State University, Kansans said they would rather see property tax cuts than income tax cuts. This finding isn’t surprising given the unpopularity (PDF) of regressive property taxes. Earlier this year, however, Kansas lawmakers did the opposite and passed sweeping reductions to the income tax.  The Institute’s Director said it was clear that, “the tax structure [Kansans] want seems to be completely the opposite of the tax policies coming from the Legislature.”

California is not the only state this election season taking taxing decisions directly to the people on November 6.  The stakes will be high for state tax policy on Election Day in nine other states with tax-related issues on the ballot. With a couple of exceptions, these ballot measures would make state taxes less fair or less adequate (or both).

Arizona

• Proposition 204 would make permanent the one percentage point sales tax increase originally approved by voters in 2010.  The increase would provide much-needed revenue for education, particularly in light of the worsened budget outlook created by a flurry of recent tax cuts.  But it’s hard not to be disappointed that the only revenue-raising option on the table is the regressive sales tax (PDF), at a time when the state’s wealthiest investors and businesses are being showered with tax cuts.

• Proposition 117 would stop a home’s taxable assessed value from rising by more than five percent in any given year.  As our partner organization, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) explains (PDF), “Assessed value caps are most valuable for taxpayers whose homes are appreciating most rapidly, but will provide no tax relief at all for homeowners whose home values are stagnant or declining. As a result, assessed value caps can shift the distribution of property taxes away from rapidly appreciating properties and towards properties experiencing slow or negative growth in value - many of which are likely owned by low-income families.”

Arkansas

• Issue #1 is a constitutional amendment that would allow for a temporary increase in the state’s sales tax to pay for large-scale transportation needs like highways, bridges, and county roads. If approved, the state’s sales tax rate would increase from 6 to 6.5 percent for approximately ten years, or as long as it takes to repay the $1.3 billion in bonds issued for the relevant transportation projects. Issue #1 would also permanently dedicate one cent of the state’s 21.5 percent gas tax (or about $20 million annually) to the State Aid Street Fund for city street construction and improvements. It’s no wonder the state is looking to increase funding for transportation projects. ITEP reports that Arkansas hasn’t increased its gas tax is ten years, and that the tax has lost 24 percent of its value during that time due to normal increases in construction costs. Governor Beebe is supporting the proposal, and his Lieutenant Governor Mark Darr recently said, “No one hates taxes more than me; however, one of the primary functions of government is to build roads and infrastructure and this act does just that. My two primary reasons for supporting Ballot Issue #1 are the 40,000 non-government jobs that will be created and/or protected and the relief of heavy traffic congestion.”

California

• For a detailed description of two competing revenue raising ballot measures in California, read California Voters to Choose Which Tax Proposals Will Pay for Schools on November 6

• Thus far overshadowed by the competing Prop 30 and 38 revenue raising proposals, Proposition 39 would close a $1 billion corporate tax loophole that Governor Brown and other lawmakers have tried, but failed to end via the legislative process.  Currently, multi-national corporations doing business in California are allowed to choose the method for apportioning their profits to the state that results in the lowest tax bill.  If Prop 39 passes, all corporations would have to follow the single-sales factor apportionment (PDF) method.  Half of the revenue raised from the change would go towards clean energy efforts while the other half would go into the general fund.

Florida

• Amendment 3 would create a Colorado-style TABOR (or “Taxpayer Bill of Rights”) limit on revenue growth, based on an arbitrary formula that does not accurately reflect the growing cost of public services over time.  As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) explains, Amendment 3 is ““wolf in sheep’s clothing” because it would phase in over several years, which obscures the severe long-term damage it would cause.  Once its revenue losses started, however, they would grow quickly. To illustrate its potential harm, we calculate that if the measure took full effect today rather than several years from now, it would cost the state more than $11 billion in just ten years.” The Orlando Sentinel's editorial board urged a No vote this week writing that voters “shouldn't risk starving schools and other core government responsibilities that are essential to competing for jobs and building a better future in Florida.”

• Amendment 4 would put a variety of costly property tax changes into Florida’s constitution, including most notably an assessment cap (PDF) for businesses and non-residents that would give both groups large tax cuts whenever their properties increase rapidly in value.  Moreover, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) explains, “Amendment 4’s biggest likely beneficiaries would be large corporations headquartered in other states, with out-of-state owners and shareholders,” including companies like Disney and Hilton hotels.

Michigan

• Proposal 5 would enshrine a “supermajority rule” in Michigan’s constitution, requiring two-thirds approval of each legislative chamber before any tax break or giveaway could be eliminated, or before any tax rate could be raised.  As we explained recently, the many flaws associated with handcuffing Michigan’s elected representatives in this way have led to a large amount of opposition from some surprising corners, including the state’s largest business groups and its anti-tax governor. Republican Governor Rick Snyder wrote an op-ed in the Lansing State Journal opposing the measure saying it was a recipe for gridlock and the triumph of special interests. Proposal 5 is also bankrolled by one man to protect his own business interests.

Missouri

• Proposition B would increase the state’s cigarette tax by 73 cents to 90 cents a pack. The state’s current 17 cent tax is the lowest in the country.  Increasing the state’s tobacco taxes would generate between $283 million to $423 million annually. The Kansas City Star has come out in favor of Proposition B saying, “It’s not often a single vote can make a state smarter, healthier and more prosperous. But Missourians have the chance to achieve all of those things on Nov. 6 by voting yes on Proposition B.”

New Hampshire

• Question 1 would amend New Hampshire’s constitution to permanently ban a personal income tax.  The Granite State is already among the nine states without a broad based personal income tax and proponents want to ensure that will remain the case forever. As Jeff McLynch with the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute explains, a Yes vote would mean that “you’d limit the choices available to future policymakers for dealing with any circumstances, and by extension, you’re limiting choices for future voters.”

Oklahoma

• State Question 758 would tighten an ill-advised property tax cap (PDF) even further, preventing taxable home values from rising more than three percent per year regardless of what’s happening in the housing market.  As the Oklahoma Policy Institute explains, “Oklahomans living in poor communities, rural areas, and small towns would get little to no benefit, since their home values will not increase nearly as much as homes in wealthy, suburban communities.”  And since many localities are likely to turn to property tax rate hikes to pick up the slack caused by this erosion of their tax base, those Oklahomans in poorer areas could actually end up paying more.  

• State Question 766 would provide a costly exemption for certain corporations’ intangible property, like mineral interests, trademarks, and software.  If enacted, the biggest beneficiaries would include utility companies like AT&T, as well as a handful of airlines and railroads.  The Oklahoma Policy Institute explains that the exemption, which would mostly impact local governments, would have to be paid for with some combinations of cuts to school spending and property tax hikes on homeowners and small businesses.  And the impact could be big.  As one OK Policy guest blogger explains: “In 1975, intangible assets comprised around 2 percent of the net asset book value of S&P 500 companies; by 2005, it was over 40 percent, and the trend is likely to continue. If SQ 766 passes, Oklahoma will find itself increasingly limited in its ability to tax properties.”

Oregon

• Measure 84 would gradually repeal Oregon’s estate and inheritance tax (PDF) and allow tax-free property transfers between family members.  If the measure passes, Oregon would lose $120 million from the estate tax, its most progressive source of revenue.   According to many legal interpretations of the measure, the second component - referring to inter-family transfers of property - would likely open a new egregious loophole allowing individuals to avoid capital gains taxes (PDF) on the sale of land and stock by simply selling property to family members.  Oregon’s Legislative Revenue Office released a report last week that showed 5 to 25 percent of capital gains revenue could be lost as a result of the measuring passing. The same report also found no evidence for the claim that estate tax repeal is some kind of millionaire magnet that increases the number of wealthy taxpayers in a state.

• Measure 79, backed by the real estate industry, constitutionally bans real estate transfer taxes and fees.  However, taxes and fees on the transfer of real estate in Oregon are essentially nonexistent, prompting opponents to refer to the measure as a “solution in search of a problem.”

• Measure 85 would eliminate Oregon’s “corporate kicker” refund program which provides a rebate to corporate income taxpayers when total state corporate income tax revenue collections exceed the forecast by two or more percent. Instead of kicking back that revenue to corporations, the excess above collections would go to the state’s General Fund to support K-12 education. Supporters of this measure acknowledge that a Yes vote will not send buckets of money to schools right away since the kicker has rarely been activated.  But, it is a much needed tax reform that will help stabilize education funding and peak interest in getting rid of the Beaver State’s more problematic personal income tax kicker.

South Dakota

• Initiative Measure #15 would raise the state’s sales tax by one cent, from 4 to 5 percent. The additional revenue raised would be split between two funding priorities: Medicaid and K-12 public schools. As a former South Dakota teacher writes, “[w]hile education and Medicaid are important, higher sales tax would raise the cost of living permanently for everyone, hitting struggling households the hardest, to the detriment of both education and health.”  This tax increase is the only revenue-raising measure on the horizon right now; South Dakotans deserve better choices.

Washington

• Initiative 1185 would require a supermajority of the legislature or a vote of the people to raise revenue. A similar ballot initiative, I-1053, was already determined to be unconstitutional. As the Washington Budget and Policy Center notes about this so called “son of 1053” initiative:  “Limiting our state lawmakers with the supermajority requirement is irresponsible, and serves only  to limit future opportunity for all Washington residents.”

As President Obama and Governor Romney discuss foreign policy in their final debate, there’s a major issue that they will, unfortunately, probably ignore: the tangle of international tax rules that allow offshore tax dodging.

The U.S. tax system is already in a mess when it comes to the rules we use to determine how profits of multinational companies are taxed. President Obama has proposed some steps to rein in the worst abuses, but most of these are relatively timid or vague. Meanwhile, Romney proposes that the U.S. follow the example of other countries that have a “territorial” system, which has facilitated high-profile tax avoidance schemes by major multinational corporations. On this issue, the U.S. needs to show leadership that has been lacking so far.

Here are the basics: The U.S. could either have a “worldwide” tax system, in which we tax the offshore profits of our corporations (but provide a credit for foreign taxes paid, to prevent double-taxation) or the U.S. could have a “territorial” tax system, which exempts the offshore profits of our corporations from U.S. taxes. What we have now is a hybrid of the two systems. The U.S. does tax the offshore profits of U.S. corporations and provides a credit for foreign taxes paid, but also allows the corporations to “defer” (delay indefinitely) those U.S. taxes, until the profits are brought to the U.S.

Under the current rules, U.S. corporations have a reason to prefer offshore profits over U.S. profits, because they benefit from the rule allowing them to “defer” U.S. taxes on offshore profits indefinitely. So they may shift operations (and jobs) to a country with lower taxes, or engage in convoluted transactions that make their U.S. profits appear to be earned by subsidiaries in countries with no (or almost no) corporate tax (i.e., offshore tax havens).

The offshore subsidiary may be nothing more than a post office box in the Cayman Islands. CTJ recently explained that Nike, Microsoft, Apple and several other companies essentially admit in their public documents that they engage in these tricks.

If allowing corporations to “defer” U.S. taxes on offshore profits causes them to prefer offshore profits over U.S. profits, then eliminating U.S. taxes on offshore profits would logically increase that preference, and increase these abuses. And that’s exactly what a territorial system, which Romney supports, would do.

CTJ has explained in a fact sheet and a more detailed report that we should move in the opposite direction by simply repealing “deferral” so that we have a true “worldwide” tax system. A CTJ report on options to raise revenue explains that repealing deferral would raise $583 billion over a decade.

President Obama has proposed far more limited steps. His most recent budget blueprint proposes to raise $148 billion over ten years with a package of provisions to crack down on the worst abuses of deferral. (The official revenue estimators for Congress projected that the provisions would raise a little more, $168 billion over a decade.)

These proposals would do some good. For example, one would end the practice of companies taking immediate deductions against their U.S. taxes for interest expenses associated with their offshore operations while they defer (not pay) the U.S. taxes on the resulting offshore profits indefinitely. Another would help ensure that the foreign tax credit, which is supposed to prevent double-taxation of foreign profits, does not exceed the amount necessary to achieve that goal. Still another would reduce abuses involving intangible property like patents and trademarks, which are particularly easy to shift to tax haven-based subsidiaries that are really no more than a post office box.

But none of these reforms proposed as part the President’s budget really addresses the underlying problem with a deferral system or a territorial system: The IRS cannot figure out which portion of a multinational corporation’s profits are truly generated in the U.S. and which portion is truly generated overseas. If a U.S. corporation tells the IRS that a transaction with an offshore subsidiary wiped out its profits, the IRS cannot challenge the company unless it can prove that the transaction was unreasonable. And that’s difficult to do, especially when the transaction involves some product or service that is not comparable to anything else in the market (like a new invention, pharmaceutical, or software program).

President Obama has also proposed, as part of his “framework” for corporate tax reform, a minimum tax on offshore corporate profits. Because he has not yet specified any rate for this minimum tax, it’s impossible to say whether it would be effective. If the rate is set extremely low, then it would change very little. In theory, if the rate was set high enough, it would almost have the same effect as ending deferral — but no one in the administration is talking about anything that dramatic. (Read CTJ’s response to the President’s “framework” for corporate tax reform.)

There are some members of Congress looking very seriously at offshore tax dodging by corporations (like Senator Carl Levin). But serious leadership is unlikely to come from the presidential candidates anytime soon.

Photo of Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Cayman Islands Flag via Austen Hufford, Justin Sloan, and J. Stephen Con Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0 

The discussion over tax policy during Tuesday night’s town hall debate between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is a case study in how candidates can make selective use of facts. Below we bring some context to some of the most significant points made about tax policy during the debate.

Canada and the “High” Corporate Tax Rate

One area of unfortunate mutual agreement between Obama and Romney is, as Obama put it during the debate, that our corporate tax rate is “too high.” Backing this notion up, Romney noted that Canada’s corporate tax rate is now “15 percent” while the U.S.’s “35 percent” and thus leaves the U.S. in a less “competitive” position.

The primary problem is that both candidates are focusing on the statutory rate (the written law), which is relatively high in the United States, rather than the effective rate (the percentage of profits that corporations actually pay in taxes), which is far lower than the 35 percent statutory rate due to tax loopholes that plague our corporate tax system. In fact, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) has found that large profitable corporations pay about half the statutory rate on average, while some companies like General Electric and Verizon pay nothing at all in corporate taxes.

Turning back to Romney’s comparison of the U.S. corporate tax rate with Canada’s, a CTJ analysis of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data actually found that the U.S. collects half as much in corporate tax revenue as Canada when measured as a percentage of GDP.

Rewriting the Legacy of George W. Bush

Getting to the core of many undecided voters’ concerns about his candidacy, one of the questioners asked Romney how his policies would differ from those of former President George W. Bush. Romney responded that he, unlike Bush, would balance the budget and that Obama had actually doubled the size of the annual Bush deficits.

What’s bizarre about this statement is that Romney is saying he will balance the budget, unlike Bush, while simultaneously doubling down on many of the same policies that drove the Bush deficits to begin with. For example, the Bush tax cuts added $2.5 trillion to the deficits between 2001-2010, yet Romney supports extending the entirety of the Bush tax cuts, which over the next ten year are estimated to cost $5.4 trillion (twice as much as in the first decade). Building on this, Romney is actually proposing roughly $5 trillion in more tax cuts over the next ten years, the costs of which he cannot offset without taxing the middle-class (which he pledges not to do).

Romney was also off base when he said that Obama doubled the federal budget deficit. For one, Obama came into office 3 months after the start of fiscal year 2009, and CBO had already projected a $1.2 trillion dollar deficit for that year. In addition, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out that the economic downturn, the bailouts, the war costs, and Bush-era tax cuts, all of which began under the Bush Administration, account for most of the budget deficit.

Taking an Interest in the Preferential Tax Rate for Capital Gains

During the discussion over which loopholes and deductions Romney would close, Obama rightfully noted that Romney has already taken off the table any option that would close or reduce the biggest tax loophole for the wealthy, the preferential rate for capital gains. As CTJ noted in a recent report, ending the preferential rate would improve tax fairness, raise revenue, and simplify the tax code. Surprisingly, Romney did not offer any defense of the preferential capital gains rate during the debate, which could be explained by the fact that he did not want to bring further attention to the fact that he personally saved $1.2 million in taxes due to the lower rate.

Instead of defending the merits of a lower rate, Romney instead highlighted his plan to eliminate taxes on interest, dividends, and capital gains for taxpayers with AGI below $200,000.  While this sounds like a boon to lower and middle-income taxpayers, the reality is that the only 6 percent of all capital gains income and 17 percent of dividend income is earned by the bottom 80 percent, so it would apply to relatively few taxpayers.

The Iowa Policy Project’s Research Director Peter Fisher is quoted in a Des Moines Register piece where he recommends that Iowa increase it Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) as one way to help low- and middle-income children. ITEP has long championed EITCs as a vital anti-poverty tax policy.  

With Halloween just around the corner, Renee Fry of Nebraska’s Open Sky Policy Institute shares the scary news that Nebraska ranks 27th among states for its regressive tax structure. Taxes are expected to be a contentious issue this year and “fiscal guru” Fry says the state’s “tax system is taking its toll in how much Nebraskans invest in schools, roads and communities. Outdated tax codes also complicate state leaders’ ability to plan strategically.”

Here’s a familiar problem, this time from Tennessee.  Big property tax breaks for farmers are reducing local tax bases by up to 20 percent. Worse, a state report says that the break is “being used by some people who clearly aren't farmers.”  Among the so-called “farmers” benefiting from this giveaway are some of the state’s wealthiest residents, like country music stars Billy Ray Cyrus and Wynonna Judd, as well as the founder of Autozone.

With a Maryland version of the DREAM Act on the November ballot, columnist Dan Rodricks at the Baltimore Sun wants readers to be aware of  the taxes that are often paid by undocumented workers, including state income taxes, federal income taxes, Social Security taxes, sales taxes, and fees.

While the presidential candidates debate whether the tax code rewards companies that move operations overseas, a new CTJ report shows that ten companies, including Apple and Microsoft, indicate in their own financial statements that most of their foreign earnings have never been taxed – anywhere. The statements the companies file with the SEC reveal that if they brought their foreign profits back to the U.S., they would pay the full 35 percent U.S. tax rate, which is how we can surmise that no foreign taxes were paid that would offset any of the 35 percent U.S. tax rate.

The most likely explanation of this is that these profits, instead of being earned by real, economically productive operations in developed countries, are actually U.S. profits that have been shifted overseas to offshore tax havens such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. This same type of offshore profit shifting was the focus of a recent Senate hearing where Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard found themselves in the hot seat.

In the tax footnote to their financial statements, companies disclose the amount of their foreign subsidiaries’ earnings which are “indefinitely reinvested,” that is, parked offshore. Calling it "indefinitely reinvested" allows them to embellish their bottom lines, on paper anyway, because they don't have to account for the cost of U.S. taxes they'd pay on that offshore income. But, they must disclose the total amount of their unrepatriated profits, and also estimate the U.S. tax that would be due if those earnings were repatriated.

A new CTJ analysis of the Fortune 500 found that, although 285 companies reported unrepatriated foreign earnings, only 47 companies disclosed in their financial statements an estimate of the U.S. income tax liability they would face upon repatriation, although that disclosure is required by accounting standards. The remaining companies hid behind a common dodge that estimating the U.S. tax would be “not practicable.” Legions of lawyers and accountants help these companies avoid taxes but can’t calculate the costs to the U.S. treasury?

Which Fortune 500 Companies are Shifting Profits to Offshore Tax Havens? ranks the 47 companies that do disclose this figure by the tax rate they’d pay if they repatriated their foreign earnings. Seven of the top ten are members, either directly or through a trade association, of the WIN America campaign that is lobbying for a repatriation tax holiday (aka corporate tax amnesty) that would let them bring the foreign earnings home at a super-low rate.

It’s not as though the rest of the Fortune 500 is innocent. CTJ’s report notably says nothing about the 238 Fortune 500 companies that have admitted having offshore hoards but refuse to calculate how much tax they’d pay. These companies include suspected tax dodgers like Google and HP, each of which has subsidiaries in known tax haven countries. In all likelihood, many of these other companies have been as successful in avoiding tax as the ten companies ranked highest in CTJ’s report.  

The new CTJ report is another reminder of what U.S.-based multinationals will do to avoid paying tax and why changing the U.S. international tax system to a territorial system is such a bad idea. Moving to a territorial tax system, which is supported by Gov. Romney and Congressman Ryan, would give companies a permanent tax holiday and encourage even more aggressive offshore profit shifting. President Obama has proposed corporate tax reform that would include a “minimum tax” on foreign earnings, although the rate has not been specified. And Congress, it seems, will be taking up overhaul of the corporate tax code next year, so watch this space for the facts about corporate America’s campaign to make dodging taxes even easier.

In last night’s presidential debate, Governor Romney pointed out that President Obama’s pension holds investments in Chinese companies and even in a Cayman Islands trust. Unlike Romney’s self-directed Individual Retirement Account, the President’s pension is in a system over which the President has absolutely no control; it’s an account with the Illinois General Assembly Defined Benefit Pension Plan. To somehow compare that with the vast wealth that Romney has personally placed offshore is ludicrous.

While Romney was at the helm of Bain Capital, the private equity firm began forming all of its new funds in the Cayman Islands through labyrinthine structures that allow investors to legally avoid – and illegally evade – tax. In addition, Gov. Romney has a Bermuda corporation which has never been explained and, of course, there is that famous Swiss bank account. Over 250 of the 379 pages of Romney’s 2011 tax return are devoted to disclosing transactions with offshore corporations and partnerships.

If Romney was trying to make the point that most investors have some holdings in companies outside of the U.S., we buy that. But if Romney’s point was that facilitating tax avoidance and evasion through complicated offshore structures is both normal and acceptable or in any way ordinary, we could not disagree more.

During Tuesday night’s presidential candidate town hall debate, President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney went at it again over, among other things, their respective approaches to tax policy.  While both candidates come up short on proposing fair and sustainable tax policy, Romney was downright brazen in misrepresenting the facts about his own and Obama’s tax plans.  Here we break down his three biggest whoppers.

Romney Says “Of Course” His Tax Plan Adds Up

After months of criticism from all sides for failing to specify which deductions he would eliminate in order to make his tax plan add up,  Romney floated the idea during the debate of having a cap where each American gets up to $25,000 of deductions and credits. As Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) noted when Romney first floated a $17,000 cap a couple weeks ago, the reality is that even if Romney eliminated every single deduction for the wealthy, he would still violate his promise to “not under any circumstances reduce the share that's being paid by the highest income taxpayers.” The tax cuts in his plan (which he does specify) would result in a net tax reduction of $250,000 on average for millionaires, even if they had to give up all the tax expenditures they currently enjoy.

Seeming to contradict his own point about the share of taxes the wealthiest Americans would pay, Romney also said that he particularly wanted to bring personal income tax rates down for individuals at the high end of the income spectrum because so many small businesses are taxed under the personal income tax. Romney is again missing the point that only 3 to 5 percent of business owners (and the richest ones at that) would be affected by a high end rate change, and it would only be on the profits those business owners take home.

When Romney defends the arithmetic of his tax plan, he emphasizes that he will not reduce “the share” of taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans. We suspect this is so he can argue later that since his across-the-board tax breaks would reduce the tax burden on different income groups equally, even if it gives the wealthiest the largest tax breaks, the ratios stay the same. Of course, it would be impossible for Romney to cut high end rates without breaking his pledge to make his plan revenue-neutral. But it’s already been established (as discussed above) that his revenue pledge conflicts with his pledge to make these specific tax cuts and pay for them without raising the net taxes paid by the middle-class.

Romney Claims Middle Class Will See $4,000 Rise in Taxes Under Obama

Trying to deflect the argument that he would have no choice but to raise taxes on the middle class to pay for his across-the-board tax cuts, Romney tried to throw it back at Obama, saying that “people in the middle class will see $4,000 per year in higher taxes” under the President’s budget plan. This is jujitsu of epic proportions.

First, Romney misrepresents a study by the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) which is NOT about higher taxes that would be levied next year, as the Governor suggested, but rather provides an estimate of what people who make between $100,000 and $200,000 could have to pay to cover their share of the debt accumulated under President Obama’s policies (both those implemented and those proposed).  Second, he’s not even talking about the middle class, because a truly middle-income taxpayer makes much less than $100,000.  Third, and most importantly, if Romney wants to say that tax proposals that would increase the debt are equivalent to future tax increases, then he needs to admit that his own plan, which likely increases the debt much more than Obama’s, is equivalent to a massive tax increase.  Indeed, Romney still hasn’t explained how he would pay for $10 trillion in tax cuts and another trillion in increased defense spending over the next ten years.

Romney Says He will Create 12 Million Jobs

One of Romney’s boldest claims of the night was that he had a “five-point plan that gets America 12 million new jobs in four years.” The numbers the Romney campaign uses to make this assertion, however, are so blatantly bunk that Romney earned 4 Pinocchios from the Washington Post’s fact checker.

Romney’s 12 million jobs claim relies most heavily on a study of Romney’s tax plan which found that it would create seven million jobs over 10 (as opposed to four) years. That study (PDF), however, rests on two false foundations. First, it overestimates the positive economic impact of tax reform, an impact which has been proven to be minimal at best. Second, because Romney has not yet laid out a plan that is even mathematically possible or detailed enough to model, the study necessarily rests on a whole series of assumptions about the plan that border on fictitious.

Romney’s evidence supporting the power of his plan to create the other five million jobs is even weaker than those he claims from tax reform. Three million of his alleged new jobs are among those that would already be created over the next eight (not four) years under current energy policies, some of which Romney actually opposes. Similarly misleading, Romney regularly points to a study with a speculative estimate that Chinese violation of U.S. intellectual property rights is costing two million jobs.  Romney wants us to infer that he would somehow save two million jobs by preventing China from pursuing this practice, even though he has never identified a truly effective tool the U.S. has at its disposal for changing the behavior of Chinese counterfeiters.

A lot of attention has been given to a recent report from Congress’s non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) on one possible approach to tax reform. Very generally, the gist of the findings is that getting rid of itemized deductions and the exemption for state and local bond interest can raise enough revenue to offset the cost of repealing certain tax provisions meant to limit tax expenditures for the well-off (the Alternative Minimum Tax being the most prominent among them) and offset the costs of a very small reduction in income tax rates.

There’s a lot to be said about the debate around this, but right now, we’d like to focus on one particularly confusing aspect of the report — its treatment of capital gains.

Currently, capital gains (profits from selling assets) are taxed at lower rates than other types of income like wages. Most capital gains go to the richest one percent of taxpayers, and this tax preference is the main reason why wealthy investors like Mitt Romney and Warren Buffett can pay a lower percentage of their income in federal taxes than many middle-income people.

So there’s an obvious fairness-based argument for ending special, low income tax rates on capital gains and simply taxing them at the same rates as other income, which would be a tax increase mostly on wealthy investors. But would this actually raise much revenue? Surprisingly, two non-partisan Congressional research agencies disagree on this point.

JCT seems to believe that little or no revenue can be raised from this reform, while the Congressional Research Service (CRS) believes JCT is too pessimistic. Citizens for Tax Justice recently followed the approaches supported by CRS, which seem far more plausible, and estimated that ending the preference for capital gains would raise $533 billion over a decade.

JCT assumes large behavioral effects on the part of investors, who (the argument goes) would be inclined to hold onto their assets longer if they will be taxed more upon selling them, resulting in fewer capital gains to be taxed. JCT finds these behavioral effects to be so large that it might estimate no revenue gain from taxing capital gains at the same rates as “ordinary” income. The recent JCT report on tax reform seems to suggest that taxing capital gains as ordinary income either loses some revenue or has no effect on revenue.

On the other hand, CRS has reviewed quantitative research and concluded that JCT significantly overestimates these behavioral impacts. CRS notes, for example, that several economists believe that there are some short-term behavioral effects that JCT and others confuse for long-term effects.

One of the economists cited by CRS is Len Burman, a professor at Syracuse University and former head of the Tax Policy Center, who testified in September before the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee on the benefits of ending the tax preference for capital gains. CTJ’s $533 billion estimate is calculated assuming the behavioral effects found in Burman’s research, which are much smaller than what JCT assumes. (The appendix in our report on revenue-raising options goes into great detail on the methodology.)

It’s not obvious which approach lawmakers will find more convincing. JCT usually has the final say on revenue estimates, but not always. For example, JCT estimates that both the Republicans’ approach and the Democrats’ approach to the Bush tax cuts would cost trillions of dollars in revenue (because Republicans would extend all of those tax cuts while Democrats would extend most of those tax cuts). And yet, nearly everyone in Congress has ignored those estimates. But that’s a topic for another day.

When Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed into law a $4.5 billion (over six years) tax cut package ealier this year, he told Kansans, “I think we are going to be in good shape.” He promised tens of thousands of new jobs and insisted “[w]e will meet the needs of our schools ... Our roads will be built.”  But after claiming as recently as July that the state was in “an excellent fiscal position,” the Governor is conceding that even across-the-board spending cuts may not be enough to make up for the massive revenue losses (projected to be $2.5 billion over six years) from these tax cuts – that will go disproportionately to the state’s most affluent.  

The Governor received national praise from conservative quarters for the tax package he signed into law in May. The plan included income tax rate reductions, elimination of several low-income credits, completely eliminating taxes on some business income, and was supposed to put the state “on a road to faster growth.” But the reality is that tax cuts cost money and Governor Brownback is now indicating he is open to a sales tax hike to pay for them.

The current 6.3 percent sales tax (a temporary revenue fix from 2010) is scheduled to drop back to 5.7 percent in July.  The Governor’s own original tax package, proposed in January, would have permanently held that sales tax rate steady, and thus cost much less than the tax legislation he eventually signed.  His plan was also seriously flawed: the bottom 80 percent of Kansas taxpayers would have seen a tax hike under the Governor’s plan because it reduced reliance on the state’s income tax in exchange for a higher sales tax. But once again, Governor Brownback finds himself relying on a higher sales tax (even though he ran against it in his 2010 campaign) because of income tax cuts that gut his state’s budget.  He rationalizes the need for a sales tax increase by saying, “There's going to be a two-year dip. That's the nature of these, when you cut taxes. If you cut them right, you get growth on the other side, but there's a dip first."

Unlike a progressive income tax, sales taxes (PDF) require low and middle income taxpayers to pay more of their income in taxes than wealthier taxpayers. This way of handling what Brownback euphemistically calls a “dip” that results from radical tax cuts actually falls hardest on the Kansas families who can least afford it.

The first and only Vice Presidential Debate of the election season between Vice President Joe Biden and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan featured a spirited discussion over their competing visions for tax policy. While watching, we began to genuinely wonder if Biden had spent time reading Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) materials considering that time and again he made precisely the points CTJ has been making for years. Ryan, on the other hand, repeatedly misrepresented the tax system and the two tickets’ tax plans.

Below we breakdown the most important tax policy moments in the debate:

1. Biden Highlights the Regressiveness of Extending All the Bush Tax Cuts

While the presidential candidates largely ignored the Bush tax cuts in their debate last week, Biden put them front and center during the VP debate when he pointed out that Romney and Ryan are proposing the “the continuation of a tax cut that will give an additional $500 billion in tax cuts to 120,000 families” over the next ten years, compared to the Obama Administration plan for the Bush tax cuts.

Biden’s formulation here is a little confusing but not incorrect. Of course, President Obama proposes to allow the Bush income tax cuts to expire for income in excess of $250,000 for couples and in excess of $200,000 for singles, and only 2 percent of taxpayers would lose any portion of their Bush income tax cuts under this approach. The administration has stated that this would cost $849 billion less, over ten years, than extending the Bush income tax cuts for all income levels, while our own estimate is that it would cost $887 billion less over ten years. Pretty close.

Biden is focusing specifically on the part of this figure that would benefit the richest 120,000 families, apparently based on figures from the Tax Policy Center. Our own calculations essentially back up Biden’s point. We estimate that the richest taxpayers with incomes exceeding $2 million in 2013 (the richest 135,000 families in 2013) would receive about 57 percent of the income tax cuts that would otherwise expire under Obama’s approach, which comes out to $507 billion over ten years.

2. Ryan Promises the Mathematically Impossible

In defending Romney’s tax plan, Ryan reiterated their ticket’s commitment to “lower tax rates across the board” and to “close loopholes,” while simultaneously sticking to the “bottom lines” of not raising the deficit, not increasing taxes on the middle class or lowering the share of income that is borne by high-income earners. But Ryan is defending a plan that CTJ has found is mathematically impossible. Even if Romney and Ryan eliminated all the tax expenditures for wealthy taxpayers that they have put on the table, our analysis has found that their across-the-board tax cuts would still require them to give an average tax break of $250,000 to individuals making over $1 million, which would violate their pledge not to lower the share of taxes borne by high-income earners.

Ryan said during the debate that there are six studies showing that their plan is possible, but Biden correctly pointed out that even the studies Ryan cites conclude that the plan would require increasing taxes on taxpayers who do not have particularly high incomes.

3. Biden Calls Ryan Out for Taking Capital Gains Tax Breaks Off the Table

One of the major reasons that the Romney campaign’s tax plan would be incapable of eliminating enough tax expenditures to add up is that Romney has specifically said that he would keep the tax breaks for capital gains and stock dividends. During the debate, Biden noted that this shows the lack of seriousness in Romney’s loophole-targeting approach because Romney has exempted the “biggest loophole” of all - the “capital gains loophole.”  As CTJ pointed out in a recent report, ending the capital gains tax preference would tremendously improve fairness, raise revenue, and simplify the tax code in one fell swoop. 

4. Ryan and Biden Dispute the Definition of Small Businesses

Repeating Romney’s line on small businesses from the first presidential debate, Ryan claimed that Obama is going to raise taxes on small businesses and kill 710,000 jobs by doing so. The reality, however, is that only the 3 to 5 percent richest business owners (individuals who could hardly be called “small business” owners) would lose any of their tax breaks, and the job loss claims are complete malarkey.

5. Biden Takes on Romney and Ryan’s Commitment to Grover Norquist

During the first presidential debate, Romney reiterated his pledge to not raise a single penny in revenue, even if the revenue was raised as part of a deal that included $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in revenue increases. Biden took issue with this commitment saying that “instead of signing pledges to Grover Norquist not to ask the wealthiest among us to contribute to bring back the middle class, they should be signing a pledge saying to the middle class we're going to level the playing field.”

Biden is absolutely right that we need to reject the extreme anti-tax approach taken by individuals like Grover Norquist and instead embrace a balanced approach to deficit reduction. The question for Romney is when he will recognize that a balanced approach is not only what the American people want, but also what business experts support as well.

6. Ryan Misrepresents History of 1986 Tax Reform

Responding to the question of what specific loopholes he and Romney are proposing to close, Ryan attempted to dodge the question by arguing that they should not lay out specific loopholes they want to close because doing so would prevent them from following the model that allowed Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill to produce the 1986 tax reform. The reality, however, as recounted by CTJ Director Bob McIntyre – whose work was integral to the passage of the 1986 reform – is that Reagan’s Treasury Department released a detailed tax reform plan explicitly laying out exactly which tax expenditures the Administration would like to see closed. In other words, the 1986 tax reform experience actually proves the opposite of what Ryan is saying about vagueness being some kind of asset.

7. Biden Revives Romney’s 47% Remark

Continuing his efforts to upend tax myths during the debate, Biden took issue with Romney’s earlier statement that 47 percent of Americans aren’t paying their fair share, and he noted that many middle income people actually “pay more effective tax than Governor Romney in his federal income tax.” Biden was right to push back against the notion that any Americans are not contributing their fair share since, on average, any American’s share of total taxes is already roughly equal to their share of total income. In addition, CTJ has found that individuals making around $60,000 do in fact pay an effective federal tax rate of 21.3% on average, which is a lot compared to Romney’s tax rate of 14% in 2011.

8. Ryan Claims Obamacare Includes 12 Middle Class Tax Hikes

During the debate, Ryan asserted, “Of the 21 tax increases in Obamacare, 12 of them hit the middle class.” The reality, according to a CTJ analysis, is that 95 percent of the tax increases included in the healthcare reform legislation would be borne by either companies or households making over $250,000. Adding to this, Ryan’s specific point about the 12 tax provisions is mostly false because 4 of the 12 provisions are not really taxes at all.

9. Biden Stumbles on the Primary Cause of Great Recession

The only significant tax policy stumble for Biden came when he argued that Ryan helped create the Great Recession by “voting to put two wars on a credit card, to at the same time put a prescription drug benefit on the credit card, a trillion-dollar tax cut for the very wealthy.” The problem of course is that the Great Recession was due primarily to a financial crisis, not some sudden crisis in government spending and deficits.

While extraordinary increases in deficit spending and tax cuts for the rich during President George W. Bush’s presidency, (which Ryan did vote for), did not cause the recession, they certainly caused an explosion in the national debt. In fact, if continued, the Bush tax cuts and the cost of the wars will account for nearly half of the public debt by 2019.

10. Ryan Wrong on How Much Revenue Could Be Raised by Taxes on the Rich

In an attempt to discredit the idea that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for the wealthiest Americans will help fix the deficit, Ryan argued that “if you taxed every person and successful business making over $250,000 at 100 percent, it would only run the government for 98 days.” To start, the entire premise of this argument is bogus because the Obama administration is not proposing a revenue-only approach to deficit reduction; in fact it has already signed into law over $2 trillion in spending cuts. In addition, Ryan ironically failed to discern, even by his own calculations, that 98 days worth of government spending would be more than enough to close the projected budget deficits and would be more than enough to pay down the national debt in the coming years.

Bad news out of Louisiana, where the chairman of a commission reviewing the state’s tax breaks says they will likely fail to make recommendations for which breaks should be reformed or eliminated.  Turns out no one has been collecting useful data on their cost and performance, and no methodology for comparing tax breaks against each other is available. Both of these shortcomings could have been prevented had the state followed ITEP’s five recommendations for tax expenditure reform .

Policy Matters Ohio has a new report reinforcing the idea that gambling revenue is not a panacea (PDF) for ailing state and local budgets.  The report’s major finding?  “New casino tax revenue will provide less than a quarter of the nearly $1 billion in annual losses local governments will see because of cuts in state aid... Ohio needs to boost its investment in schools, local governments and human services with additional revenue from those who can afford to pay. Revenue from gambling does not suffice.”

Here’s a great blog post from our friends at the Oklahoma Policy Institute (OKPolicy) about the diastrous tax plan that Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed last May, and why Oklahoma policymakers shouldn’t pursue the same sorts of costly and regressive tax cuts enacted by their neighbors in the Sunflower State.  OKPolicy concludes, “Oklahoma does not need to be the next laboratory for Kansas’ radical tax experiment.”

Picking up on Mitt Romney’s infamous assertion about the 47 percent, this post from the Wisconsin Budget Project answers the question “Who’s in the “47%” in Wisconsin?” They use Census data and figures from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) to figure out who really are the “moochers.” The Budget Project argues that there are “numerous Wisconsin workers who would probably love to earn enough to owe income taxes,” so the smart move would be implementing policy options to improve their compensation and help them join the tax -paying ranks.

In November, California voters will decide on two not-so-different revenue raising ballot measures.  Proposition 30, backed by Governor Jerry Brown, temporarily raises income taxes on the state’s wealthiest taxpayers and increases the sales tax by a quarter cent.  The rival measure, Proposition 38, temporarily raises personal income tax rates on all taxable income upwards of about $50,000.  Californians can technically vote for both measures on the ballot, but even if both “win” only the one with the most votes will become law, so voters must choose carefully.

Both measures would raise billions of dollars in much needed revenue for education spending, primarily from the wealthiest Californians. An Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) analysis published by the California Budget Project found that the wealthiest one percent of Californians, with incomes averaging $532,000, would pay for close to 80 percent of the tax increase under Proposition 30 and around 45 percent under Proposition 38.  

As ITEP’s Meg Wiehe explained it to the San Francisco Chronicle recently, the big question for voters is not so much a tax fairness one but more about “'where do I want the money to go?  They both have very different end goals with the amount of money raised.”

California is one of a dozen or so states handicapped by a law that says a supermajority of lawmakers must approve of any tax changes. (Just as invoking the filibuster rule requires 60 votes to get anything done in the U.S. Senate, and we’ve all seen how well that works!) Facing a multi-billion dollar budget gap, Governor Jerry Brown first tried to raise revenues via the normal legislative process, but was stopped short of the two-thirds support needed. So he turned to the ballot process – and the people – to get the revenue increase the state needed.  The revenue from Proposition 30 would go into a new Education Protection Account in the state’s General Fund, increasing funding for K-12 and community colleges and freeing up other general fund dollars to address other spending priorities.  Importantly, Brown also built $6 billion of trigger cuts into his FY12-13 budget if Proposition 30 does not pass in November.  In other words, the governor’s budget was built on the premise that the revenue from his measure would be available and if it loses, naturally spending would have to be reduced by that amount mid-year.

All revenues from Proposition 38 would go directly to K-12 schools and only K-12 schools. None of the revenue could be spent on any other budget priorities since it can only supplement rather than supplant current spending on K-12 education; however, about a third of the funds can be used to reduce state debt. Even with the billions of dollars in new revenue Proposition 38 would bring to the Golden State, if it gets more votes than Proposition 30, $6 billion in spending cuts would automatically go into effect as per the Governor’s budget, forcing reductions in vital programs such as community colleges, universities, corrections and others. 

In large part due to this one striking difference between the two measures – that Proposition 30 would prevent devastating spending cuts and Proposition 38 would not – both the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle have endorsed Proposition 30.

It’s worth mentioning that some opponents of both measures have hauled out the millionaire migration canard, suggesting California’s wealthiest residents will flee if asked to pay higher taxes. But as ITEP’s Carl Davis explained to the Silicon Valley Mercury News, "There just isn't any persuasive evidence out there to make you think that there would be a significant number of Californians moving because of this tax change.” In fact, the newspaper’s own analysis found that over the past 15 years, the share of the country’s ultra rich living in California has gone unchanged, even with a series of temporary tax increases and a new millionaire’s tax in 2004.

For more detail on who would pay for each of the ballot initiatives, ITEP’s analysis can be found in three California Budget Project reports: What Would Proposition 30 Mean for California?, What Would Proposition 38 Mean for California?, and How do Propositions 30 and 38 Compare?

by CTJ Director, Robert McIntyre

In a speech at the National Press Club on October 9, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) joined with President Obama in calling for revenue-raising tax reform, by closing loopholes and reversing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, to help address our nation’s long-term deficit problem.

“We must reduce the deficit, which is strangling our economic growth,” Schumer said. “And we must seek to control the rise in income inequality, which is hollowing out the middle class.”

Schumer added: “It would be a huge mistake to take the dollars we gain from closing loopholes and put them into reducing rates for the highest income brackets, rather than into reducing the deficit.”

Specifically, Sen. Schumer called for restoring the top personal income tax rate on top earners to the Clinton-era 39.6 percent and “reducing but not eliminating” the current huge gap between the extremely low tax rates on high-income investors and the much higher tax rates on working people.

So far pretty doggone good. But then Sen. Schumer stumbles. Here’s what he says about corporate (and other business) taxes:

“Some on the left have suggested corporate tax reform could be a source for new revenue, but I disagree. To preserve our international competitiveness, it is imperative that we seek to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent and do it on a revenue-neutral basis.”

Oops! Despite the fact that U.S. corporate income taxes are almost the lowest in the developed world (PDF) as a share of the economy, Schumer seems to think that the amount we now collect in corporate income taxes is just about perfect. That’s simply ridiculous.

For one thing, the kind of “tax reform” that big corporations and their allies in Congress are promoting would be perverse. Their central goal is to eliminate U.S. taxes on corporations’ foreign profits. Of course, to keep their promise to break even, their version of “tax reform” would have to increase U.S. taxes on profits earned here in the United States.

One could point out that the U.S. already collects almost nothing in taxes on American corporations’ foreign profits. But corporate leaders would like to convert our current indefinite “deferral” of taxes on foreign profits into a permanent exemption.

Why would anyone think this approach would help our “international competitiveness”? Well, you have to understand what corporate leaders mean by that term. They don’t mean making it more attractive to invest and create jobs in the United States. Quite the contrary. They mean making it more attractive for companies to invest and create jobs in foreign countries.

Real corporate tax reform would do the opposite, by ending the indefinite deferral (PDF) of tax on foreign profits. Companies may still invest abroad for economic reasons, but at least we wouldn’t be subsidizing them to do so.

There’s a second point. Due to a plethora of tax subsidies, we also have very low taxes on corporate profits earned in the United States. And a fat lot of good that’s done us economically. So we should be increasing corporate taxes on U.S. profits, too. Not on all companies, to be sure. But on average, Fortune 500 corporations now pay only about half the official 35 percent corporate tax rate on their U.S. profits. A quarter of these giant corporations now pay less than 10 percent in U.S. taxes on their U.S. profits, including many that pay nothing at all.

Closing the loopholes that allow such rampant domestic corporate tax avoidance, including curbing loopholes that allow companies to artificially shift their U.S. profits into foreign tax havens, should be a key part of a balanced deficit reduction strategy. By doing so, we can not only help get deficits under control, we can also afford to make the investments in education and infrastructure that will really make investing and creating jobs in the United States more likely.

So Sen. Schumer, congratulations on pointing out the need for more revenue from wealthy individuals. Now, if you can just appreciate the equally important need to get more revenues from America’s tax-avoiding corporations, well, you’ll be a real tax reform hero for our time.

It recently came out that one man—billionaire Manuel Moroun—is almost singlehandedly responsible for getting Proposal 5, (dubbed the “two thirds” tax proposal by supporters), onto Michigan’s November ballot.  If enacted, the proposal would require two-thirds approval of each legislative chamber before any tax break or giveaway could be eliminated, or before any tax rate could be raised.  The results of such a “supermajority” restriction would be unambiguously bad for Michigan.

Paying for schools, roads, and police would become much more difficult over time as the costs of these services grow and Michigan’s narrow sales tax, flat income tax, and flat gas tax would struggle to keep up. The risk of a downgrade in Michigan’s credit rating would also increase under a supermajority rule, as the range of options for keeping the state’s finances in order would be drastically reduced.  Tax reform would become much more difficult, as many loophole-closing proposals could suddenly be blocked by a small minority of legislators.  And the ability of Michigan’s government to deal responsibly with unexpected fiscal crises would be greatly reduced.

Unsurprisingly, all of these dangers are of little concern to folks like Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal, who’s almost certainly never met a tax cut he didn’t like.  But many stakeholders based in Michigan, who would actually have to deal with these consequences, have concluded that a supermajority requirement would do far more harm than good.

Both of the state’s largest business groups—the Chamber of Commerce and Business Leaders for Michigan—have come out against the measure.  In noting just how restrictive the measure would be Chamber President Rich Studley quipped that “on some days you couldn’t get a two-thirds vote in the Legislature on what time of day it is.”  Even Governor Rick Snyder, whose record on tax policy we’ve criticized a number of times, opposes the supermajority rule on the grounds that it’s “not good public policy” and would have “unintended consequences.”  Other opponents include the Senate Majority Leader, AARP Michigan, the Farm Bureau, and the Michigan Municipal League, among many other groups.

And it appears that Michigan voters are getting the message.  As the Detroit News reports, polling show that “support for Proposal 5 … plunged 17.5 percentage points, from 68 percent a month ago to 50.5 percent” in mid-September. That is not only the most recent poll, but it’s also relevant because ballot measures usually need at least 60 percent support in September to have much chance of passing in November, since support tends to wane closer to the election.

The Michigan League for Human Services has more details on why a supermajority requirement is a super-bad idea (PDF) for Michigan, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a report on the issue as well. And at CTJ, we’ve been writing for years about how these rules cripple legislatures and hamstring democracy by undermining the power of elected representatives.

Oh, and there’s a chilling, masters-of-the-universe twist to the story, too. The reason this one man went to all that trouble and expense to buy the proposal a spot on the ballot is not because he’s on some ideological crusade. Rather, he wants to make sure Michigan can never afford to invest in a new bridge to Canada – because it would compete with the one he owns. 

Image from Metro Times, Detroit.

While most commentators have focused on the back-and-forth between President Barack Obama and former Governor Mitt Romney over tax rates and deficit reduction during the first presidential debate, we paid extra close attention to what the candidates said about corporate and small business taxes. Unfortunately, we found what both candidates had to say really wanting.

Corporate Tax Reform

Early in the debate, Obama noted that he and Romney have something of a consensus over corporate taxes in that they both believe that “our corporate tax rate is too high.” If there's such an agreement, it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding. While the U.S. has a relatively high statutory corporate tax rate of 35 percent, the effective corporate tax rate (the percentage of profits that corporations actually pay in taxes) is far lower because of the loopholes they use to shield their profits from taxes. CTJ has found that large profitable corporations pay about half the statutory rate on average, while some companies like General Electric and Verizon pay nothing at all in corporate taxes.

President Obama proposes to close corporate tax loopholes, but would give the revenue savings right back to corporations as a reduction in the statutory tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, resulting in no change in revenue, as outlined in his corporate tax reform framework released earlier this year. (During the debate Obama actually said he’d lower the statutory rate to 25 percent, which seems more likely a misstatement than an intentional policy shift.)

In contrast, 250 non-profits, consumer groups, labor unions and faith-based groups have called for a corporate tax reform that actually raises revenue in order to pay for critical government investments and reduce the budget deficit.

Of course, Governor Romney also proposes a deep cut in the statutory corporate tax rate (to 25 percent) and is far more vague on whether he would bother to offset the costs.

Romney took issue with Obama’s claim during the debate that the tax code currently allows companies to take a deduction for moving plants overseas, saying that he had “no idea” what Obama was talking about and that if such a deduction really exists that he may “need to get a new accountant.” Technically, Obama is right that the tax code currently allows companies to take a deduction for business expenses of moving a plant overseas, but he leaves out the fact that companies are allowed to deduct most business expenses, including those associated with moving facilities. In any case, Romney certainly does not to need to hire a new accountant.

What both candidates missed during this discussion was that our current tax system does in fact encourage corporations to move operations overseas by allowing them to defer taxes on foreign profits. To his credit, Obama proposed, as part of his 2013 budget and in his framework for corporate tax reform, several reforms to the international tax system that would reduce the size of this tax break, although he has not gone as far as to call for an end to deferral entirely. In contrast, Romney wants to blow a giant hole in our corporate tax by moving the US to territorial tax system, under which US companies would pay nothing on offshore profits.

Small Business Taxes

During the debate Romney revived a classic tax myth by claiming that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for income over $250,000 will harm small businesses because a lot of businesses “are taxed not at the corporate tax rate, but at the individual rate.” Obama pushed back noting that he had “lowered taxes for small businesses 18 times” and that under his plan “97 percent of small businesses would not see their income taxes go up.”

A Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) analysis found that only the 3 to 5 percent richest business owners would be lose any their tax breaks under Obama’s plan. The CTJ report also points out that if you’re a business owner, tax breaks affect how much of your profits you can take home, but not whether or not you have profits. A business owner will make investments that create jobs if, and only if, such investments will lead to profits, regardless of what tax rates apply.

In an attempt to push his small business claim even further, Romney cited a study by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) claiming that Obama’s plan will force small business to cut 700,000 jobs. When the NFIB report came out during the summer, the White House did a fine job of pointing out the many, many outrageous distortions in the report. Just to take one, the NFIB report makes assumptions about the relationship between taxes and investment that are far out of line with those of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office and even the Treasury Department during the Bush administration.

Oil and Gas Tax Breaks

President Obama stated that the oil industry receives “$4 billion a year in corporate welfare” and added that he didn’t think anyone believes that a corporation like ExxonMobil really needs extra money coming from the government. Romney hit back saying that the tax break for oil companies is only $2.8 billion a year and that Obama had enacted $90 billion worth of tax breaks in one year for green energy, which he said dwarfed the oil tax breaks 50 times over.

On the oil company tax break claims, Obama’s figure is much closer to the truth. The President’s 2013 budget has a package of provisions that would eliminate or reduce special tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry and the Treasury estimates this would raise $39 billion over a decade. (See page 80 of this budget document.) A CTJ report explains the arguments for these provisions. Ironically, the oil industry itself puts this number much higher, claiming that the Obama administration’s proposal would eliminate about $8.5 billion in tax breaks it receives annually.

In addition, FactCheck.org points out that Romney’s claims on Obama’s clean energy tax breaks were largely bogus. Just to list some of the problems with Romney’s $90 billion claim, FactCheck.org notes that these breaks were spent over two years not one, that the figure includes loan guarantees not just actual spending, and that many of these “breaks” were spent on infrastructure projects.

During the first presidential debate of this election season, President Barack Obama and former Governor Mitt Romney’s discussion focused primarily on what is arguably the most important issue of this election: tax policy. Over half of the debate was spent on the intricacies of tax policy, from the treatment of small businesses to the precise revenue cost of trillions of dollars in proposed tax cuts.  Here we offer some criticism and context.

Size of the Candidates’ Tax Cut Plans

Early in the debate Obama explained that Romney’s “central economic plan calls for a $5 trillion tax cut – on top of the extension of the Bush tax cuts.” Romney denied this, saying “I don’t have a $5 trillion cut. I don’t have a tax cut of the scale that you’re talking about.” Romney added that his plan would not “reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people” and that it would “provide tax relief to people in the middle class.”

The truth is that Romney isn’t proposing a $5 trillion tax cut, he’s proposing to cut taxes by over $10 trillion over ten years. Romney proposes new tax cuts costing around $500 billion a year (according to the Tax Policy Center) on top of making permanent all the Bush tax cuts, which by themselves would cost $5.3 trillion over a decade.

Romney is proposing to make up some of the $5 trillion in additional tax cuts by closing loopholes, eliminating deductions and other tax expenditures, but he has kept his plan secret so far and has refused to name even a single tax expenditure he would eliminate or loophole he’d close.

An analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice found that even if millionaires were forced to give up all the tax expenditures that Romney has put on the table, his tax plan would still give a tax break of at least $250,000 on average for individuals making over $1 million. That is, he simply cannot back up his assertion that he is “not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high- income people.” And if he really is going to make up the revenues we’ll lose to his rate cuts, taxes would have to go up for other taxpayers.

Throughout the debate, Romney referred to several studies showing that his plan is mathematically possible (a low standard to meet to be sure), but the reality is that the studies he’s referring to aren’t all actual studies, nor do they fully support his plan.

It’s important to note that while Romney’s tax plan is the height of fiscal irresponsibility, Obama himself is proposing to extend most of the Bush tax cuts, at a cost of $4.2 trillion over the next ten years. The President assured the audience that he wants to “continue the tax rates - the tax cuts that we put into place for small businesses and families.  But,” he continued, “for incomes over $250,000 a year that we should go back to the rates that we had when Bill Clinton was president,” that is, the pre-Bush tax cuts rate.

CTJ has analyzed Obama’s plan and found that extending 78 percent of the Bush tax cuts will lose far too much revenue in the long run. The President’s plan would extend the tax cuts for the first $250,000 a married couple makes. We also found that married couples making between $250,000 and $300,000 would still continue to enjoy, on average, 98 percent of the Bush tax cuts. Fewer than two percent of taxpayers would lose any part of the Bush tax cuts under Obama’s plan, so it’s hardly a bold proposal for reducing the deficit and restoring urgently needed revenues.

In other words, neither presidential candidate showed on Wednesday night that they have fully come to terms with the fact that the United States cannot afford continuing to hand out trillions of dollars in tax cuts.

Long Term Deficit Reduction Plans

At a Republican presidential debate over a year ago, Romney joined with all the other candidates in saying that they would reject any deal that raised tax revenues, even one that would include $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in additional tax revenue – ten times more in crippling spending cuts than tax increases. When pushed by the moderator during Wednesday’s presidential debate, Romney stood firm, saying that he had “absolutely” ruled out the possibility of raising additional revenue to reduce the deficit.

The Simpson-Bowles Commission plan to balance the budget, which Romney praised last night, however, requires a ratio of $1 in spending cuts to $1 in revenue increases (compared to the budget baseline that Obama and many members of Congress use). Ironically, by seemingly embracing Simpson-Bowles, Romney put himself to the left of Obama, whose own long term deficit reduction plan actually cuts fewer taxes and less spending than Simpson-Bowles. As Obama explained in the debate: “the way we do it is $2.50 for every cut, we ask for a dollar of additional revenue.”  (And he repeatedly points out, of course, that his health care legislation will slow the deficit’s growth by reducing Medicare costs.)

Neither candidate is acknowledging the elephant in the room. In the long-run, what they really have to do to fix the budget deficit is just to stop extending most or all of the Bush tax cuts, or find a way to pay for those parts they do extend.

The difficulty of enacting real tax reform is on display in Louisiana, where a commission studying the state’s tax breaks just heard from some of the industries and interests seeking to protect their special breaks and loopholes.  For example, a retail group claimed that a sales tax exemption for international tourists doesn’t actually cost the state because it raises $1.80 in revenue for every $1.00 foregone. In the end, though, it did cost the state $1.1 million in sales taxes last year.

Transportation officials in Kansas and Tennessee are in an increasingly common situation: looking for new revenues as their states’ gas taxes dwindle because of rising construction costs and improving vehicle fuel-efficiency.  Officials in both states seem to recognize that a gas tax hike is needed, but in Tennessee at least, the state’s anti-tax governor has reportedly ruled that out.

In November, voters in Kansas will be asked to decide whether their state constitution should be changed to lower taxes on boats and other watercraft. Changing a state’s constitution to reward boat purchases? Seriously? The experts who wrote the ITEP Guide warn that “tax policies that systematically favor one kind of economic activity or another can lead to the misallocation of resources or, worse, to schemes whose sole aim is to exploit such preferential tax treatment.”  Let’s hope Kansas voters don’t start down this slippery slope.

The Savannah Morning News editorial board is urging the state legislature to fix a tax break in the Georgia Tourism Development Act which was intended to encourage development but “apparently is indecipherable” and can’t be implemented. The bureaucratic quagmire the legislation created highlights one of many problems with trying to micromanage economic development through the tax code.

Read the PDF version of this document.

As President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney face off in their first debate, a number of big-picture questions about tax policy remain unanswered by either candidate.
 

Given the budget deficit, why should we extend all of the Bush tax cuts (as Romney proposes) or most of the Bush tax cuts (as Obama proposes)?

■ The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a full extension of the Bush tax cuts, which Governor Romney supports, would cost about $5.2 trillion over ten years, including interest, while President Obama’s proposal to extend most, but not all, of those tax cuts will cost about $4.3 trillion over ten years, including interest.

■ That means if Congress enacts one of these approaches, we lose either $5.2 trillion or $4.3 trillion, compared to current law (compared to what would happen if Congress does nothing).

Given that the Bush tax cuts, taken together, disproportionately benefit the rich, why should we extend all or most of them?

■ Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that the richest one percent of Americans would receive 32 percent of the benefits of a full extension of the Bush tax cuts, which Governor Romney supports.

■ CTJ finds that the richest one percent would receive 11 percent of the benefits from Obama’s proposal to extend most, but not all, of the Bush tax cuts (and the other tax cuts Obama wants to extend).

■ By way of comparison, the poorest fifth of Americans would get just one percent of the benefits from the Republican approach and just 3 percent of the benefits from Obama’s approach.

Why have neither Obama nor Romney proposed to end the tax loophole that is targeted to the richest one percent of taxpayers — the special, low tax rate for capital gains?

■ Romney proposes to enact new tax cuts (on top of extending the Bush tax cuts) but claims that he can offset the costs by limiting tax expenditures (tax deductions, exclusions, credits and other special breaks). But Romney pledges to retain the most unfair tax expenditure of all, the lower rate for capital gains, which allows wealthy investors like himself and Warren Buffett to pay a lower effective tax rate than many working people.

■ Meanwhile, Obama proposes to limit the value of each dollar of deductions and exclusions for the rich to 28 cents, and he would impose a minimum tax on people making more than $1 million. Both measures are relatively complicated and neither would entirely eliminate situations in which wealthy investors pay a lower effective tax rate than wage-earners.

■ The most straightforward reform would be to eliminate the most unfair tax expenditure by repealing the special rate for capital gains and simply taxing all personal income under the same tax rates. CTJ estimates this would raise at least $533 billion over a decade.

Why does neither candidate propose to raise needed revenue from corporate tax reform?

■ President Obama has proposed to close corporate tax loopholes, while Governor Romney has been unclear on this point. But any revenue saved from corporate loophole-closing under either candidate would be given back to corporations in the form of a reduction in their tax rate. Both candidates have proposed to reduce the official 35 percent corporate income tax rate (to 28 percent in the case of Obama and 25 percent in the case of Romney).

■ Corporations claim that they are burdened by the statutory tax rate of 35 percent, but their effective tax rate (the percentage of profits they actually pay in taxes) is usually far lower than that because they use loopholes to shield much of their profits from taxes.

■ Each of the reasons used by corporate lobbyists to argue for lower taxes is easily refuted. For example, they claim that the corporate tax is ultimately borne by the workers, but if that was true, then corporations wouldn’t bother lobbying Congress to lower it.

■ An obvious way to address our fiscal problems is to close corporate tax loopholes and use the revenue to reduce the deficit or pay for education, infrastructure or other investments.

To make watching the debates just a little more fun, we created a Bingo card with all the tax and budget related terms we expect the two candidates to trot out time and again over the coming debates. (If you want to make the debates even more fun you could have a drink everytime they use one of these words as well, but you didn't hear this from us.)

Missouri might just be the poster child for why it’s so important to ramp up the amount of scrutiny given to special tax breaks.  From 2005 to 2009, the state accidentally spent over $1.1 billion more on tax credits than lawmakers expected.  More recently, despite its budget being squeezed by a poor economy, Missouri’s tax credit spending continued on auto-pilot, actually rising by some 15 percent, while education and health spending fell well short of Missourians’ needs (PDF).  Making matters worse, the only tax credit “reform” to come close to passage in recent years was an unsuccessful effort to scrounge up some tax credit savings and blow them on a massive giveaway designed to turn the St. Louis airport into a futuristic hub for freight between China and the Midwest.

What Missouri and other states need is a way to carefully evaluate all of their tax breaks on an ongoing basis, and an incentive to get lawmakers to act when a tax break is proven to not be worth the cost.  Our sister organization, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), just published a new resource outlining five steps that states can take to make this basic standard of good governance a reality, and showing that over a dozen states have already taken at least one of these steps.

In brief, those steps are:

1. Require tax breaks to include specific goals and measurable objectives.
2. Require rigorous analyses of the success (or lack thereof) of tax breaks by trained, non-partisan analysts.
3. Use “sunsets” (or expiration dates) to spur lawmakers to debate and vote on tax breaks after they’ve been analyzed.
4. Require the Governor’s budget proposal to include recommendations on tax breaks after they’ve been analyzed.
5. Require the legislature to hold hearings on tax breaks after they’ve been analyzed.

Every state has significant room for improvement when it comes to the level of scrutiny it applies to special tax breaks.  To learn more, read ITEP’s report: Five Steps Toward a Better Tax Expenditure Debate.

CTJ Analysis Shows That Millionaires Would Get Average Tax Cut of $250,000 Even If Deductions and Exclusions Are Limited to Zero

Today, presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney suggested that one way to offset the cost of his proposed tax cuts would be to limit deductions to $17,000.

“As an option you could say everybody’s going to get up to a $17,000 deduction; and you could use your charitable deduction, your home mortgage deduction, or others – your healthcare deduction. And you can fill that bucket, if you will, that $17,000 bucket that way,” he said on a local Denver news show. “And higher income people might have a lower number.”

In September, Romney argued that he would eliminate enough deductions, exclusions and other special breaks to offset the costs of the new tax cuts he proposes, and that the net result would not be a tax increase for the middle-class or a tax cut for the rich.

But an August analysis from Citizens for Tax Justice demonstrated that even if itemized deductions and exclusions were eliminated entirely, people who make over $1 million would still see an average net tax break of $250,000 in 2013 under Romney’s plan.

That’s partly because the new tax breaks that Romney proposes are so generous to the rich that they would outweigh the loss of any deductions or exclusions. In addition to making permanent all the Bush tax cuts, Romney would reduce income tax rates by a fifth and eliminate the AMT and the estate tax.

Another reason is that Romney pledges to keep the special breaks that benefit the wealthy most of all — breaks for investment and savings like the special low rate for capital gains.

As a result, there is simply no way to Romney could fill in the details of his tax plan in a way that will not result in huge tax cuts for the very rich.

For low- and middle-income people, the loss of tax expenditures (tax deductions, exclusions, credits and other breaks) under Romney’s plan could outweigh any gains from the tax rate reductions and other new tax cuts, resulting in a net tax increase. In fact, this result is inevitable if Romney is to accomplish his goal of not further increasing the deficit while at the same time cutting taxes for millionaires by at least $250,000 on average.

Let’s start with the good news.  There's a growing recognition among even the most virulently anti-tax lawmakers that one core area of government is actually underfunded and needs revenues: transportation maintenance and construction.

Unfortunately, there’s some bad news, too. Rather than fixing the gas tax shortcomings that have led to transportation coffers (quite predictably) running dry, many of those same lawmakers want to divert money away from education, health care, and other services, and spend it on roads and bridges instead.

One lawmaker touting this approach is Iowa Governor Terry Branstad.  While Branstad should be praised for realizing that the gas tax should be raised next year, his broader plan to couple that increase with big cuts in income taxes and local property taxes completely misses the mark.  If enacted, everything from schools to police departments will have to be scaled back just so that Branstad can avoid the “tax raiser” label some political operatives might pin on him for favoring a long-overdue and much-needed gas tax hike.

Governor Branstad's approach echoes one outlined earlier this year by his counterpart in Virginia, Governor Bob McDonnell.  During a conversation with the Associated Press (AP), McDonnell hinted that he might reverse his opposition to raising the gas tax if it’s done as part of a broader, revenue-neutral tax “reform” package.  As we explained then, however:

“Even if McDonnell believed the state’s gas tax needs to be raised and indexed, his opposition to raising any new revenue overall is almost guaranteed make his reform agenda bad for the state.  That’s because every dollar in new revenue McDonnell might generate for transportation would have to be offset with a dollar in tax cuts elsewhere in the budget—presumably from a tax that funds education, human services, public safety, and other core government functions.”

These proposals to actually increase the gas tax might seem remarkable at first, coming from governors who are as opposed to taxes as Branstad and McDonnell.  But when you peel away the layers, the logic behind the proposals is nothing new.  In the face of lagging gas tax revenues, politicians have frequently raided other revenue streams in order to avoid raising taxes but still keep their transportation systems afloat. Nebraska, Utah, and Wisconsin did it in 2011, and Michigan, Oklahoma and the federal government did it in 2012.  At their core, Branstad and McDonnell’s approaches are just accomplishing the same outcome but in a more roundabout way: shifting money around in a way that benefits roads at the expense of everything else.

For a smarter approach, see the recommendations made in Building a Better Gas Tax, from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an organization “committed to educating the public about issues that have significant fiscal policy impact” and running several programs to address the budget deficit, issued a working paper last week calling for corporate tax reform that has no impact on the budget deficit.

The paper actually does a good job of laying out the issues and the options, explaining that a corporate tax rate reduction could be enacted without increasing the budget deficit so long as lawmakers choose to reduce or eliminate tax expenditures (tax loopholes and tax preferences) to offset the costs of lowering the rate.

But why would a deficit-hawk group not call for a more ambitious goal than simply avoiding an increase in the deficit? Doesn’t everyone agree that we should (eventually anyway) reduce the budget deficit? 

Part of the problem may be that there is a lot of misinformation about the corporate income tax. Citizens for Tax Justice has as fact sheet and a report explaining why Congress should enact a corporate tax reform that is revenue-positive (that raises tax dollars). They address some of the common fallacies about corporate taxes.

For example, corporate leaders and their lobbyists sometimes claim that the corporate tax is ultimately borne by American workers, who pay the price when the tax pushes corporations offshore. This can be disproven by the research that finds the vast majority of the corporate tax to be borne by the owners of corporate stocks and business assets and by the common sense observation that corporations would not bother lobbying Congress to lower their taxes if they did not believe their shareholders were the people ultimately paying them.

CTJ is not alone in believing corporations should contribute more. Last year, a letter we circulated calling for revenue-positive corporate tax reform was signed by 250 organizations, including national groups and state-based groups in every state, before being sent to every member of Congress. The letter explains,

Some lawmakers have proposed to eliminate corporate tax subsidies and use all of the resulting revenue savings to pay for a reduction in the corporate income tax rate. In contrast, we strongly believe most, if not all, of the revenue saved from eliminating corporate tax subsidies should go towards deficit reduction and towards creating the healthy, educated workforce and sound infrastructure that will make our nation more competitive.

This year, Americans for Tax Fairness, the campaign formed by several national organizations (including CTJ) to raise awareness about revenue issues, decided that one of its basic principles is that “any corporate tax reform should require the corporate sector to contribute more in federal income-tax revenue than it does now, not less.”