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Approval Marks a Major Step Towards Enacting President's Agenda

On Wednesday, both the House and Senate approved a Congressional budget resolution for fiscal year 2010 that paves the way for several of the President's major initiatives. The resolution allows Congress to make new investments in education and clean energy and puts in place procedures that will make it easier for Congress to enact comprehensive health care reform. It also allows Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts for all but the richest Americans.

The budget resolution allows for about $3.5 trillion in federal spending in fiscal year 2010 and includes important tax and spending provisions related to years after that. It is not a law and is not binding, but puts in place caps on the spending that Congress appropriates each year, sets targets for tax and spending changes and includes certain procedural changes that make it more likely Congress will meet these goals.

Tax Cuts Extended for All but the Rich

For example, the budget resolution allows Congress to reduce revenues by a certain amount by extending the Bush income tax cuts. It is understood that the amount of revenue-reduction allowed would be sufficient to extend the Bush tax cuts for those with incomes below $250,000. It also allows for Congress to reduce revenues by preventing the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) from expanding as it is scheduled to under current law. Similarly, it allows Congress to extend the estate tax rules in effect in 2009 instead of allowing the estate tax to revert to the rules put in place during the Clinton years, before Bush's cuts in the estate tax were enacted.

The resolution allows for Congress to enact these tax cuts without finding new revenue to pay for them -- on one condition, which is that Congress enacts a statutory pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) rule that will (in theory) prevent Congress from enacting any more legislation that will increase the deficit. That means that any additional tax cuts (say, an extension of the Making Work Pay Credit that was enacted for two years as part of the economic stimulus package) would have to be combined with revenue-raising provisions to offset the costs.

Predictably, allies of former President George W. Bush have expressed horror that Democratic leaders and President Obama wish to extend the Bush tax cuts for 97.5 percent of Americans rather than 100 percent. The Democrats and the President would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for singles with incomes over $200,000 and married couples with incomes over $250,000 (which make up roughly the richest 2.5 percent of taxpayers).

For their part, House Republicans used the budget debate to demonstrate to the public just how lopsided the tax code would be if their goals were ever realized and just how much government would have to shrink because of the revenue losses that would result. Earlier this month, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee presented his tax and spending plan which would cut and privatize Medicare, convert Medicaid into limited block grants to states, repeal the recently enacted economic stimulus law and deeply cut the relatively small amount of government spending devoted to non-military, non-mandatory programs.

Citizens for Tax Justice published a report concluding that under this GOP plan, over a third of taxpayers, mostly low- and middle-income families, would pay more in taxes than they would under the House Democratic plan in 2010, while the richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $75,000 less, on average.

Final Budget Leaves Out the Senate's Outrageous Estate Tax Cut

Progressives scored a victory when Democratic leaders agreed to exclude from the final budget an amendment adopted by the Senate during its budget debate on April 2 which would slash the estate tax to benefit multi-millionaires. Before the Senate approved this amendment, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said, "It is so stunning, so outrageous that some would choose this hour of national crisis to push for an amendment to slash the estate tax for the super wealthy." His common sense view carried the day as negotiators hammered out the final resolution.

The tax cuts enacted under President Bush in 2001 scheduled a gradual repeal of the estate tax, with the amount of assets exempted from the tax gradually increasing over a decade and the tax rate on estates gradually dropping until the estate tax would disappear entirely in 2010. Like almost all of the Bush tax cuts, this cut in the estate tax expires at the end of 2010, meaning that rules scheduled under President Clinton would come back into effect in 2011.

The budget resolutions passed out of the House and Senate budget committees in March both assumed that the estate tax rules in place in 2009 would be made permanent, meaning the Bush estate tax cut would be partially made permanent but the estate tax would not disappear entirely in 2010. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report finding that about 99.7 percent of estates would be untouched by the tax under this proposal.

Incredibly, 51 Senators voted in favor of the amendment offered by Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) to cut the estate tax even more than this. The 2009 estate tax rules exempt the first $7 million of assets passed on by a married couple (as well as assets they leave to charity) and tax the rest at a rate of 45 percent. The Kyl-Lincoln amendment called for a $10 million exemption for married couples and a 35 percent rate.

Taking Steps Towards Enacting the President's Priorities

Progressives scored another victory in the area of health care. House and Senate leaders decided to include in the final budget resolution a mechanism known as "reconciliation" which will allow the Senate to enact health care reform and higher education loan changes with a simple majority vote.

The practice of filibustering legislation in the Senate has, over the years, turned into a default rule that three fifths the Senate's members must agree to pass a bill. This means that legislation supported by Senators representing a majority of Americans is often blocked. Many advocates fear that this is exactly what could happen to health care reform and many other of the President's important initiatives.

Reconciliation is a way around this obstacle. A budget resolution can include reconciliation instructions specifying that committees will pass legislation that can then pass the full House and Senate under a streamlined process. In the Senate, that streamlined process means that the bill can be passed with just 51 votes.

The particular version of reconciliation included in this budget is optional, meaning Democratic leaders will resort to using it only if bipartisan consensus proves elusive.

Several Republican Senators, and some Democratic Senators, have taken the view that majority rule is undemocratic, and have called reconciliation a partisan ploy to "ram through" the President's agenda. (The idea of the Senate moving too quickly is a little hard for any Hill observer to understand.) More importantly, enacting health care reform will require Congress to raise a great deal of revenue, and finding a large bipartisan majority for that might be a challenge.

Finally, some have complained that reconciliation is only to be used for deficit-reduction, but this is entirely unconvincing because these are largely the same members who voted in favor of reconciliation bills during the Bush years that actually increased the deficit by cutting taxes.

New Data from Citizens for Tax Justice Shows that the U.S. Tax System Is Not as Progressive as You Think

Many politicians, pundits and media outlets have recently claimed that the richest one percent of American taxpayers are providing a hugely disproportionate share of the tax revenue we need to fund public services. New data from Citizens for Tax Justice show that this simply is not true. CTJ estimates that the share of total taxes (federal state and local taxes) paid by taxpayers in each income group is quite similar to the share of total income received by each income group in 2008.

- The total federal, state and local effective tax rate for the richest one percent of Americans (30.9 percent) is only slightly higher than the average effective tax rate for the remaining 99 percent of Americans (29.4 percent).

- From the middle-income ranges upward, total effective tax rates are virtually flat across income groups.

Read the fact sheet.

A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice answers many of the questions that are frequently asked about taxes during this time of year and clears up the old myths that are still accepted by many as fact. Here is just a sample of some of the questions that are answered:

Question: Does President Obama plan on raising our taxes?

Question: There might be cyclical downturns and upturns in the economy that no one can control, but don't tax cuts help us climb out of downturns a little faster?

Question: What are "tax havens" and why are some people in an uproar over them?

Question: What does it matter to me if someone else is hiding their income from the IRS?

Read the report.

As we approach April 15th, one complaint we often hear is that Americans who work hard and become successful have to pay over a third of their income in federal income taxes. But a recent report from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) shows that this is not remotely true.

As a new CTJ fact sheet explains, the IRS data show that the federal income tax rates paid by the highest-income Americans have dropped substantially since 2000, largely due to cuts in the tax rates on capital gains and dividends pushed through by the Bush Administration. While income from work (salaries and wages) is subject to rates as high as 35 percent, income from investments (long-term capital gains and stock dividends) is taxed at only 15 percent.

The IRS report shows that in 2006 (the latest year for which data are available), the 400 richest income tax filers paid just 17.2 percent of their adjusted gross income (AGI) in federal income taxes. That is down from 22.3 percent in 2000, and is less than half of the top statutory income tax rate of 35 percent.

Read the CTJ fact sheet.

The U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate both approved budget resolutions on Thursday that move Congress a step closer to enacting President Obama's agenda, without being quite as bold or explicit as the budget outline released by the President in late February. Both resolutions would spend about $3.5 trillion in 2010 and include non-binding, but important, provisions affecting spending and revenues in years after that. As lawmakers from both chambers leave Washington for their spring recess, behind-the-scenes negotiations will likely pave the way for a House-Senate conference to take place upon their return to iron out the differences between the two resolutions. On some key issues like estate tax and health care, the House has made wiser choices that will hopefully be maintained in the final budget resolution.

The basic thrust of many of the tax policies embodied in the budget resolutions mirror the President's proposals. Both assume the extension of the Bush income tax cuts for everyone except taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 (or $250,000 for married couples). Taxpayers above these thresholds are affected by the top two income tax rates, which would revert to 36 and 39.6 percent. Both resolutions would extend the "AMT patch," a measure that increases the exemptions from the Alternative Minimum Tax to ensure that most taxpayers are not affected by it. (The chambers differ on the extent to which the costs of the AMT patch will have to be offset with revenue-raising measures in the future.)

The resolutions do not follow the President's proposals on certain issues. For example, President Obama proposed that the income tax cuts aimed at working families and included in the recently-enacted stimulus bill be made permanent. The resolutions would make some of these permanent, like the expansion in the child tax credit and the American Opportunity Tax Credit for higher education.

But they would not make permanent the Making Work Pay Credit, one of Obama's signature tax policies. Neither do they include any specific language to create a "cap and trade" program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which, in the President's proposal, would produce the revenue needed to offset the costs of the Making Work Pay Credit and other energy initiatives.

Similarly, the resolutions do not include language laying out how Congress will pay for health care reform. (The President's budget outline included a reduction in the benefits of itemized deductions for the rich to partially fund health care reform.)

None of this means that Congress will not act on these proposals of the President's. The resolution includes language allowing for deficit-neutral legislation in these areas without specifying how money will be spent or how it will be raised.

Congress's next important test involves settling the differences between the House and Senate resolutions. When it comes to revenues raised to pay for health care or revenues raised from the estate tax, hopefully the choices made by the House will be maintained in the final budget resolution. See the following Digest articles for more.

Estate Tax: Senate Approves a Break for Millionaires that Leader Reid Calls "So Stunning, So Outrageous"

Reconciliation for Health Care Reform: House Moves to Stop Senators' Obstruction of Measures with Majority Support

House GOP's Alternative Budget: Poor Pay More, Rich Pay Less, Stimulus Repealed and Government Shrinks

When anti-tax activists and lawmakers complain that Congress and the President are pursuing policies that will cause taxes to be too high, the first question anyone should ask is: Compared to what? What exactly is the alternative to allowing the Bush tax cuts to end (at least for the rich) and finding new ways to raise revenue?

This week the House GOP showed us what the alternative is and it's frightening. On Wednesday, the ranking Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives' Budget Committee, Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), released a budget plan which he argues is a more fiscally responsible alternative to the budget outline proposed by President Obama and the similar budget resolutions approved by both chambers last night. His proposal is apparently an update of the plan that House GOP leaders introduced last week and is different in some key respects.

The revised House GOP budget plan would move towards cutting and privatizing Medicare, convert Medicaid into limited block grants to states, and even cut Social Security benefits for some retirees. The plan would deeply cut the relatively small amount of government spending devoted to non-military, non-mandatory programs by refusing to adjust the budgets of these programs for inflation and population growth for five years. The House GOP plan would repeal the recently enacted economic stimulus law (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or ARRA) a year before its expiration at the end of 2010.

A report from Citizens for Tax Justice compares the income tax proposals in the House GOP plan to the income tax proposals in the House Democratic plan in 2010, and finds that:

• Over a third of taxpayers, mostly low- and middle-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the House Democratic plan in 2010.
• The richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $75,000 less, on average, in income taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the Democratic plan in 2010.
• The income tax proposals in the House GOP plan, which is presented as a fiscally responsible alternative to the Democratic plan, would cost over $225 billion more than the Democratic plan's income tax policies in 2010 alone.

Read the report.

Yesterday, the ranking Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives' Budget Committee, Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), released a budget plan which he argues is a more fiscally responsible alternative to the budget outline proposed by President Obama and the similar budget resolutions working their way through the House and Senate right now. His proposal is apparently an update on the plan that House GOP leaders introduced last week and is different in some key respects.

A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice compares the income tax proposals in the House GOP plan to the income tax proposals in the House Democratic plan in 2010, and finds that:

• Over a third of taxpayers, mostly low- and middle-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the House Democratic plan in 2010.
• The richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $75,000 less, on average, in income taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the Democratic plan in 2010.
• The income tax proposals in the House GOP plan, which is presented as a fiscally responsible alternative to the Democratic plan, would cost over $225 billion more than the Democratic plan's income tax policies in 2010 alone.

Read the report.

Yesterday, the Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives released the outlines of a tax and spending plan that they argue is a more fiscally responsible alternative to the budget outline proposed by President Obama and the similar budget resolutions working their way through the House and Senate.

A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice compares the income tax proposals in the House GOP plan to the income tax proposals in the President's plan and finds that:

• Over a fourth of taxpayers, mostly low-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the President's plan.
• The richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $100,000 less, on average, under the House GOP plan than they would under the President's plan.
• The income tax proposals in the House GOP plan, which is presented as a fiscally responsible alternative to the President's plan, would cost over $300 billion more than the Obama income tax cuts in 2011 alone.

Read the report.

This week, Citizens for Tax Justice updated its recent report on the tax proposals in the President's budget outline to include estimates of the proposals' impacts on different income groups in every state. The new state figures examine the proposed cuts compared to current law and also compared to the baseline that the Obama administration uses in presenting its budget figures. The figures show that, whichever baseline is used, the vast majority of families in every state will get a significant tax break.

Read the report. (State-by-state figures are in the final appendix.

On February 26, President Obama sent to Congress the blueprint for what could be one of the most progressive federal budgets in generations. The budget calls for national health care reform, expanded education funding, a program to reduce global warming, and several improvements in human needs programs. As a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice explains, it would make the tax code considerably more progressive, and close a number of egregious tax loopholes.

There is, however, a flaw in the budget proposal: It does not raise enough revenue to pay for public services. Instead, its net effect is to cut taxes dramatically.

Opponents of the President have attempted to argue that the budget proposal calls for tax increases that could sink the economy, but this complaint is plainly unfounded. President Bush and his allies in Congress were adamant that lower taxes would lead to an explosion of prosperity, and they enacted tax cuts in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2006. Some allies of the former President argue that Congress is now insufficiently focused on tax cuts, but this view seems bizarre and incredible given the sad economic facts all around us.

Indeed, one might reasonably conclude that we could safely allow most of the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of 2010, as they are scheduled to under current law, without any concern about how this will impact the economy. But President Obama actually proposes to keep most of the Bush tax cuts. Obama's largest proposed tax cut is to re-enact 80 percent of the Bush tax cuts that are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. Most of this reflects re-enacting the Bush income tax cuts for married couples with incomes below $250,000 and others with incomes below $200,000 (or put another way, for about 98 percent of taxpayers), and permanently reducing the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). In addition, Obama proposes to re-enact close to half of the Bush estate tax cut.

On top of re-enacting most of the Bush tax cuts, the Obama budget includes a number of additional tax cuts for families and individuals. (These would be extensions of temporary tax cuts included in the recently passed stimulus law.) It also proposes some questionable business tax cuts.

Partially offsetting its tax-cut proposals, the Obama budget proposes some significant revenue-raising provisions. These include a cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions, a limit on the benefits of itemized deductions for high-bracket taxpayers, and a number of corporate and high-income loophole-closing measures.

Read the Report

Revised March 4, 2009

On Thursday, President Obama sent his budget blueprint to Congress. While many of the details remain to be seen, it's the most progressive budget we've seen in years. It's also a more honest budget than the last administration ever proposed. For example, it doesn't pretend that the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will expand its reach to tens of millions of additional taxpayers (which Congress never allows), and it includes the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars instead of pretending that they will end this year.

It goes a long way towards making the tax system fairer and more progressive. The tax portion of the budget would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for the very rich and includes revenue-raising provisions that are progressive, environmentally friendly and which, in some cases, would make the tax code simpler.

But the budget blueprint does muddle the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for all but the top 2 percent of individual taxpayers by using a baseline that assumes the Bush tax cuts have already been made permanent, when in reality they are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. (In other words, the Obama administration is using a baseline that assumes John McCain won the presidential election and his allies swept both chambers of Congress and were able to enact his tax policies!)

Continuing the Bush tax breaks for 98 percent of taxpayers and providing AMT relief will cost $2.6 trillion over the 10-year budget period. That's a steep price to pay for tax cuts that have not delivered their promised benefits. As the budget moves through Congress, we hope that the goal of long-term deficit reduction will prevail and the Bush tax breaks will be reduced even more. This could mean, for example, further raising the rates on capital gains and scaling back the cut in the estate tax. These changes would help move us towards the day when the government actually collects enough revenue to pay for the services it provides.

In addition to extending a lot of the Bush tax cuts and providing AMT relief, the President's budget would also provide around $770 billion in additional tax breaks targeted to working class people, plus over $70 billion in tax cuts for business. These are offset with several revenue-raising provisions, including a "cap and trade" program to limit carbon emissions, cleaning up the international tax system and eliminating loopholes for energy companies and other corporations.

These provisions are all included in the tax portion of the budget proposal. Other parts of the proposal include other revenue-raisers. For example, the budget includes a new provision that would limit the benefit of itemized deductions so that they could not reduce taxes by more than 28 percent (instead of, say, 35 percent for people rich enough to be affected by the 35 percent income tax rate). This provision would raise revenue to offset new health care spending.

This budget may not be perfect, but it does take several steps to find revenue to invest in our future and support working class families.

Next week, CTJ will provide a more detailed analysis of the President's budget and its tax provisions.

The President's Fiscal Responsibility Summit

Expect to see some drama next week around the federal budget. First, on Monday, President Obama will convene a "Fiscal Responsibility Summit" with Congressional leaders and others to "to send a signal that we are serious" about the long-term deficits faced by the federal government, focusing on entitlement programs. Obama has been sending signals that he is open to any and all ideas about how to get the federal budget back under control once our economy is back on track. Which is alarming, because a lot of ideas floating around out there are incredibly bad.

For one thing, the supporters of the Bush tax cuts still fail to acknowledge that those tax cuts account for about half of the federal debt piled up by the Bush administration before the financial crisis. Pretty much all of the Republican leaders in Congress claim to be deeply concerned about the deficit, but none have waivered in their commitment to the policies that have created much of it.

Another problem is the focus on entitlements. Medicare faces a crisis, which is the crisis of exploding health care costs that we can only contain by reforming the entire health care system. Exploding health care costs are, many analysts have concluded, the single largest cause of long-term federal budget deficits.

But several right-wing policy advocates have made a cottage industry out of claiming that Social Security must be slashed in order to save America. The most notorious is Peter Peterson, the trillionaire who has set up a foundation to promote his version of "fiscal responsibility" and who apparently has been invited to the summit. CTJ director Robert McIntyre lambasted Peterson back in 1994 in a column in the American Prospect, saying, "Along with tax cuts for the rich, he explicitly endorses tax increases for the poor and the middle class as well as sharp reductions in what average families receive from the government."

McIntyre's criticism is mild compared to the assessment progressives give Peterson today. "Peterson, who made his fortune on Wall Street," writes Robert Borosage, "never raised a word about the dangers of hyper-leveraged finance houses gambling other people's money. He never expressed qualms about the leveraged buyout artists who were using debt finance to rip apart companies. He didn't fund an all-out effort to stop Bush from raiding the Social Security surplus to pay for tax cuts for the rich. But now he wants folks headed into retirement who have already prepaid a surplus of $2.5 trillion to cover their Social Security retirements to take a cut or work a few years longer to cover the money squandered on bailing out banks, wars of choice abroad and tax cuts for the few."

The President's Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Proposal

The drama won't end at the President's Fiscal Responsibility Summit. The President is also expected to release the outlines of his budget proposal next week, and it could contain some very important tax proposals. During his presidential campaign, Obama proposed to extend the Bush tax cuts (which mostly expire at the end of 2010) for all taxpayers except those with incomes above $200,000 (or $250,000 for married couples). CTJ calculated that this would essentially mean that the Bush tax cuts are extended for all but the richest 2.5 percent of taxpayers. It would also cost well over a hundred billion dollars a year, and that's before you add the cost of Obama's promised reform of the Alternative Minimum Tax or his other tax proposals. Meanwhile, he also pledged to repeal the Bush tax cut early for those taxpayers with income above the $200,000/$250,000 threshold, but he has hedged on that promise in recent months.

Obama also campaigned on promises to close some tax loopholes (like the carried interest loophole and loopholes enjoyed by the oil and gas industry) and clean up other parts of the tax code. It will be interesting to see what components of his campaign promises are included in his budget proposal.

Interestingly, the administration has stated that it will not engage in the same gimmicks used by the previous administration to conceal the true size of the budget deficit. For example, the Bush administration always assumed that the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) would be allowed to extend its reach to tens of millions of additional taxpayers, which of course made the budget appear more balanced than it truly was, even though everyone knew that Congress would enact a "patch" every year to prevent the AMT from expanding its reach. So this budget process may be more transparent than any we've seen in years.

On February 13, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and seven co-sponsors introduced a bill that would impose a tax on securities transactions. The 0.25 percent tax would be imposed on the value of the securities traded. Rep. DeFazio proposes the measure as a way to pay for the various Wall Street bailouts.

This proposal would, in theory, raise revenue from the folks who benefitted from the bailouts. But there's another proposal we like better. Congress should simply eliminate the loophole in the income tax for long-term capital gains and corporate stock dividends, which subjects these forms of income to a top rate of just 15 percent.

People who earn wages must pay income taxes at progressive rates as high as 35 percent, and the first $102,000 a person earns in a year is, in addition, subject to payroll taxes of around 15 percent. So allowing people who live off their investments to pay a tax rate of only 15 percent is grossly unfair. As Warren Buffet recently pointed out, he pays a lower tax rate that his secretary, thanks largely to the loophole in the federal income tax for capital gains and dividends.

And it truly is the wealthy who primarily benefit. A report issued by CTJ in May of last year found that 70 percent of the benefits of President Bush's tax cut for capital gains and dividends goes to the richest one percent of taxpayers. The report also cited IRS data showing that in 2005, this loophole cost the Treasury $91.7 billion.

So getting back to Congressman DeFazio's proposal, we find several advantages of a higher capital gain rate over a securities transaction tax:

• Taxing capital gains at a higher rate would tax only those transactions that resulted in a gain, while a securities transaction tax would be imposed on every trade, whether or not there was a profit.
• A higher capital gains tax rate would be imposed on all capital gain transactions, not just those that arise from exchange-traded securities transactions. (Many derivative transactions are not traded on an exchange.)
• Taxing capital gains at ordinary tax rates would make the tax system much more fair and progressive. Taxpayers in the lower rate brackets would pay a lower rate on their capital gains while taxpayers in the higher brackets would pay a higher rate.
• Taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income would eliminate the many, many tax avoidance schemes that taxpayers use to convert ordinary income to capital gains.
• Taxpayers would make decisions based on economics -- not on the tax treatment of different investments -- eliminating a lot of market distortion.

Unfortunately, many lawmakers feel a strong urge to expand the most egregious loophole in the federal income tax rather than repeal it. On the same day that the DeFazio proposal was introduced, Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) introduced a bill to raise the capital loss limitation from the current $3,000 per year to $10,000 per year. This would provide another tax break for the wealthy. Generally, taxpayers can use capital losses to offset capital gains, and if they have net capital losses, they can deduct $3,000 of that against ordinary income. The rest is carried over to future years. If there were no limit, investors could choose to sell only assets that have a loss and offset other types of income, even though they might have unrealized gains in other capital assets. An October, 2008 CTJ report analyzed a similar proposal made by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) during his presidential campaign and criticized the idea for the same reason.

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

Less Than a Quarter of the House GOP's Tax Rate Reduction Proposal Would Go to the Poorest 60 Percent of Taxpayers

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

On the other hand, the plan proposed by Democrats in the House of Representatives (which is scheduled to come to a floor vote today), delivers tax cuts to working families who don't pay federal income tax but pay a lot in payroll taxes. For example, the "Making Work Pay Credit" would give married couples with $8,100 or more in wages the full $1,000 credit provided in the bill. In order to have an equivalent benefit from the Republican rate reduction, a married couple (with two children) would have to have $46,000 of gross income. The House Democrats' plan would also expand the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) which are smaller tax breaks in terms of revenue but are even more targeted to working families.

Read the new CTJ report.

Charges that Progressive Taxes Are "Socialism" Fail to Rally Support for Candidate McCain

Senator Barack Obama, who ran for president partly on a platform of ending George W. Bush's policies of cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans, will be our new president starting January 20, 2009. He will have the support of a House of Representatives and Senate led by opponents of the Bush tax cuts.

His opponent, Senator John McCain, tried several times to frame the tax debate in a way that would lead average Americans to support tax cuts for the very wealthiest taxpayers. None of these attempts succeeded. At one point, the McCain campaign tried to get the public to pay more attention to Obama's vote for a non-binding budget resolution than Obama's actual tax plan. Later, a McCain surrogate argued that allowing the expiration of tax cuts for the richest 1.4 million taxpayers would be a tax increase on 23 million business owners. Near the end, McCain made an argument implying that the EITC, and really any progressive income tax, was socialism. Americans were not impressed with these arguments.

The 2008 election has important lessons for lawmakers regarding taxes. Arguments that taxes must be lowered for even the richest Americans simply do not work. Americans don't buy it. Nor do Americans buy it when proponents of tax cuts attempt to blur the details about who would benefit the most. There has always been polling that shows Americans do not support any and all tax cuts, but it took an election to make this real for many lawmakers.

The Path Ahead

Some people may speculate about whether the new President will muster the support needed to enact the proposals dear to them. We also feel this uncertainty, but it is mitigated by the crucial fact that the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2010. To put it a different way, if Congress simply does nothing, we will return to the tax policies in effect during the Clinton years, when the economy performed better than it does now, and when Americans were generally more positive about the direction of the country. That would be fine with us.

We know that Congress is not likely to do nothing. Congress, with President Obama's leadership, may enact tax cuts, including extending the Bush tax cuts for those who are not rich. (Since such a gigantic share of the Bush tax cuts currently goes to the rich, Obama's proposal will lose much less revenue than would candidate McCain's proposal to extend them for even the richest families.) And Congress is likely to act on at least some of President Obama's proposals to enact brand new tax cuts for low- and middle-income Americans.

But those lawmakers who insist on extending the Bush tax cuts for the even the richest Americans have no cards left to play. Their cherished handouts for the rich expire in a couple years and the new president is not likely to sign any bill that extends this party for the most privileged.

Of course, a great many details must be worked out. Obama wants to repeal the Bush tax cuts before they expire for the very richest families, and some lawmakers will dig in their heels to oppose this. Another question is the extent to which new tax cuts will be paid for. While most analysts agree that balancing the budget is not a priority during a severe economic downturn, we certainly hope that Congress will not enact huge, permanent tax cuts without replacing most of the revenue -- revenue needed to fund health care initiatives and other investments that have been short-changed during the Bush administration. There are ways that Congress can raise revenue that go beyond what is included in Obama's tax plan, and we will be making these suggestions to the new administration. And of course there are some tax cuts that Obama supports that would benefit the wealthy -- like a partial extension of the Bush tax cuts for dividends and estates -- and we're going to have an interesting conversation about that.

But the most salient fact is that the surreal era of leaders telling us that taxes must be cut most dramatically for the wealthy is over. This is a sea change. We may have trouble explaining to future generations how such a bizarre ideology ever took hold. But we will have no trouble explaining that on Tuesday Americans looked at the long list of problems facing this country and decided that cutting taxes for the rich should not be considered a priority.

For eight years we have had a White House fixated on tax cuts for the rich, at the expense of all other priorities. Now, the millions of Americans who lack health insurance or who are underinsured, the newly unemployed, the families losing their homes, and Americans serving their nation in the armed forces all know that their struggles are finally back at the top of the agenda in Washington.