Tag Archives: tax policy

The Accounting On This Would Cost More Than The Gains

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MSN Money posted an article from The Wall Street Journal today. The article deals with the Democrats’ latest plan to raise taxes on things that are not currently taxed. The Democrats don’t seem concerned with cutting spending–they just want more of your money.

The article explains the plan:

The income tax is the Swiss Army Knife of the U.S. tax system, an all-purpose policy tool for raising revenue, rewarding and punishing activities and redistributing money between rich and poor.

The system could change fundamentally if Democrats win the White House and Congress. The party’s presidential candidates, legislators and advisers share a conviction that today’s income tax is inadequate for an economy where a growing share of rewards flows to a sliver of households.

For the richest Americans, Democrats want to shift toward taxing their wealth, instead of just their salaries and the income their assets generate. The personal income tax indirectly touches wealth, but only when assets are sold and become income.

At the end of 2017, U.S. households had $3.8 trillion in unrealized gains in stocks and investment funds, plus more in real estate, private businesses and artwork, according to the Economic Innovation Group, a nonprofit focused on bringing investment to low-income areas. Most of the value of estates over $100 million consists of unrealized gains, said a 2013 Federal Reserve study. Much has never been touched by individual income taxes and may never be.

Under current law, when stocks and investment funds are inherited, the person inheriting them pays no tax on the capital gains that were accrued during the time the previous owner possessed the stock. At the point of inheritance, new capital gains begin to accrue. For example, if a person of modest means bought five shares of a stock a month over a period of ten years and his $3000 a year investment was worth $300,000 at his death, his heirs would receive the $300,000 worth of stock and pay capital gains when they sold it on the basis of that $300,000. The idea is to encourage people to invest. The Democrats want to change that.

The article reports:

In campaigns, Congress and academia, Democrats are shaping tax plans for 2021, when they hope to have narrow majorities. There are three main options.

President Obama left office with a list of ideas for taxing the rich that might have raised nearly $1 trillion over a decade. The most important was taxing capital gains at death.

The idea was too radical for a serious look from Congress at the time. Now, to a Democratic base that has moved left, it looks almost moderate.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the candidate most prominently picking up where Mr. Obama left off, has proposed repealing stepped-up basis. Taxing unrealized gains at death could let Congress raise the capital gains rate to 50% before revenue from it would start to drop, according to the Tax Policy Center, because investors would no longer delay sales in hopes of a zero tax bill when they die.

And indeed, Mr. Biden has proposed doubling the income-tax rate to 40% on capital gains for taxpayers with incomes of $1 million or more.

But for Democrats, repealing stepped-up basis has drawbacks. Much of the money wouldn’t come in for years, until people died. The Treasury Department estimated a plan Mr. Obama put out in 2016 would generate $235 billion over a decade, less than 10% of what advisers to Sen. Warren’s campaign say her tax plan would raise.

That lag raises another risk. Wealthy taxpayers would have incentives to get Congress to reverse the tax before their heirs face it.

Mr. Obama’s administration never seriously explored a wealth tax or a tax on accrued but unrealized gains, said Lily Batchelder, who helped devise his policies.

“If someone’s goal is to raise trillions of dollars from the very wealthy, then it becomes necessary to think about these more ambitious proposals,” she said.

Instead of attacking favorable treatment of inherited assets, Mr. Wyden goes after the other main principle of capital-gains taxation—that gains must be realized before taxes are imposed.

The Oregon senator is designing a “mark-to-market” system. Annual increases in the value of people’s assets would be taxed as income, even if the assets aren’t sold. Someone who owned stock that was worth $400 million on Jan. 1 but $500 million on Dec. 31 would add $100 million to income on his or her tax return.

The tax would diminish the case for a preferential capital-gains rate, since people couldn’t get any benefit from deferring asset sales. Mr. Wyden would raise the rate to ordinary-income levels. Presidential candidate Julián Castro also just endorsed a mark-to-market system.

For the government, money would start flowing in immediately. The tax would hit every year, not just when an asset-holder died. Mr. Wyden would apply this regime to just the top 0.3% of taxpayers, said spokeswoman Ashley Schapitl. Mr. Castro’s tax would apply to the top 0.1%.

The article concludes:

The Constitution says any direct tax must be structured so each state contributes a share of it equal to the state’s share of the population. A state such as Connecticut has far more multimillionaires per capita than many others, so its share of the wealth tax would far exceed its share of the U.S. population. How Ms. Warren’s wealth tax might be categorized or affected is an unsettled area of law relying on century-old Supreme Court precedents.

Still, the wealth tax polls well, and Democratic candidates are eager to draw a contrast with President Trump, a tax-cutting billionaire.

Republicans will push back. Rep. Tom Reed (R., N.Y.) says tax increases aimed at the top would reach the middle class. “It easily goes down the slippery slope,” he said. “If it’s the 1%, it’s the top 20%.” he said.

The bookkeeping would be ridiculous. The tax forms would be intimidating. Let’s keep moving in the direction of simpler tax forms and less taxation. The next step should not be more taxes–it should be less spending.

The Trump Tax Cuts

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The following is a graph from a New York Times article of April 14th:

The article notes:

To a large degree, the gap between perception and reality on the tax cuts appears to flow from a sustained — and misleading — effort by liberal opponents of the law to brand it as a broad middle-class tax increase.

That effort began in the fall of 2017, when Republicans prepared to introduce legislation that models by the independent Tax Policy Center predicted could raise taxes on nearly a third of middle-class taxpayers. It continued through Mr. Trump’s signing of the law, even though the group’s models showed that the revised bill would raise taxes on relatively few in the middle class in the 2018 tax year.

The only thing missing from the article is The New York Times taking some responsibility for what is illustrated by the chart.

It gets even more interesting. The article also includes this chart:

This might be a reflection of the news sources the Democrats choose versus the news sources the Republicans choose. It illustrates the fact that much of what is being reported in major news sources is simply not true. Much of the mainstream media is doing a disservice to the people who choose to watch it.

The Real Numbers vs The Propaganda

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Guy Benson posted an article at Townhall today about taxes.

The article includes the following:

Democrats already have a well-worn, and misleading, talking point about it: 83 percent of the tax cuts go to the wealthiest 1 percent. That’s true for 2027 but only because most of the individual income tax changes expire by then…The important missing context is that the final tax legislation, which President Donald Trump signed into law Dec. 22, allows most of its individual income tax provisions to expire by 2027, making the tax benefit distribution more lopsided for the top 1 percent than in earlier years. In 2018, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the top 1 percent of income earners would glean 20.5 percent of the tax cut benefits — a sizable chunk, but far less than the figure that’s preferred by Democrats. And in 2025, that percentage would be 25.3 percent, with the top 1 percent (those earning above $837,800) getting an average tax cut of $61,090. Just two years later, in 2027, the percentage of tax benefits to this income group jumps to 82.8 percent, “because almost all individual income tax provisions would sunset after 2025,” explains TPC. 

The article explains who pays income taxes:

The much-maligned top one percent paid more than 37 percent of all federal income taxes that year, which is the most recent on record for which we have data.  The top three percent footed just over half of the total federal income tax bill.  And those in the top five percent were responsible for paying nearly 60 cents of every federal income tax dollar collected by Uncle Sam.  If you look at the black lines on the bar graph above, you will see that the federal income tax share paid by “the rich” far outpaced their respective portions of the nation’s overall earnings.  The bottom half of US earners — 50 percent of the country — paid approximately three percent of all federal income taxes in 2016, slightly less than the contributions of the top .001 percent alone.  The Left’s political stories about “fair shares” and “millionaires and billionaires” may pack a potent rhetorical punch in the service of fueling grievance politics and class warfare, but they’re not grounded in facts and omit crucial perspective.  It’s worth noting that in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, the GOP holds a record-high 15 point lead over Democrats on the economy.

It really is time to consider a flat tax, where deductions are very limited and everyone pays the same percentage. Our current tax code is demotivational–it does not encourage prosperity. However, in reality we need to fix the spending–that will eventually fix the tax code.

 

The Laffer Curve At Work

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Yesterday CNS News reported that during the month of January (the first month the Trump tax cuts were in effect), the federal government ran a surplus.

The article reports:

January was the first month under the new tax law that President Donald Trump signed in December.

During January, the Treasury collected approximately $361,038,000,000 in total tax revenues and spent a total of approximately $311,802,000,000 to run a surplus of approximately $49,236,000,000.

Despite the monthly surplus of $49,236,000,000, the federal government is still running a deficit of approximately $175,718,000,000 for fiscal year 2018. That is because the government entered the month with a deficit of approximately $224,955,000,000.

The article also reports some of the history:

Over the last twenty fiscal years, going back to 1999, the federal government has run surpluses in the month of January 13 times and deficits 7 times. Six of the Januaries in which the federal government ran deficits overlapped President Barack Obama’s time in office—including January 2009, the month Obama was inaugurated, and the Januaries in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2016.

If you are not familiar with the Laffer Curve, it is a financial theory that the website the balance describes as follows:

The Laffer Curve is a theory that states lower tax rates boost economic growth. It underpins supply-side economics, Reaganomics and the Tea Party’s economic policies. Economist Arthur Laffer developed it in 1979.

The Laffer Curve describes how changes in tax rates affect government revenues in two ways. One is immediate, which Laffer describes as “arithmetic.” Every dollar in tax cuts translates directly to one less dollar in government revenue. 

The other effect is longer-term, which Laffer describes as the “economic” effect. It works in the opposite direction. Lower tax rates put money into the hands of taxpayers, who then spend it. It creates more business activity to meet consumer demand. For this, companies hire more workers, who then spend their additional income. This boost to economic growth generates a larger tax base. It eventually replaces any revenue lost from the tax cut.

This is an illustration of how the Laffer Curve works:

As you can see, there is a point where taxes reach a high point and the amount of revenue generated from taxes goes down. That is not a coincidence–that is what tax attorneys get paid for. One of the reasons we need to make the tax code simpler is that we need to take away the complexities that allow people to hide income and avoid taxes. I believe that was one of the goals of the Trump tax plan. It remains to be seen whether or not that goal was achieved.