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The GOP Tax Bill Disses the Working Class

Here's something about the GOP House and the GOP Senate:  they each passed tax bills (supposed to come out in a "conference" agreement sometime today) that diss the United States' working class taxpayers.  White or black, Christian or Jew or other, citizen by birth or naturalized citizen--workers are treated as an inferior "taker" class and owners are treated as a superior "maker" class--the same old GOP class warfare that has been evidenced in Republican-driven tax legislation for decades.  That shows in the provisions that have been discussed quite a bit already, even though there is no official distributional analysis and even though the Treasury Department put out a one-pager claiming to provide an analysis showing huge economic growth would eliminate any deficits (based on both the tax "reform" legislation and promised cost-cutting "reforms" to Medicare and Social Security):

• the  significant reduction in impact of the estate tax,
• the huge reduction in the statutory corporate tax rate of most benefit to officers/shareholders (it was 35%, it will be 21% under the conference agreement, apparently, even though the "effective" corporate tax rate ranged from negative to around 24-25%--essentially more favorable than many of our fellow advanced economies' corporate tax rates);
• the territoriality of the corporate tax (generally, zero tax on foreign earnings of U.S. companies);
• immediate expensing of company investments (a five year provision that allows companies huge tax benefits for those five years);
• the elimination of the corporate alternative minimum tax (AMT), at a cost of about $250 billion in revenues.
• the reduction in the top rate for wealthy individuals (from 39.6% to 37%),
• the substantial reduction in the  State and Local Tax Deduction for workers (thus changing entirely the economics of paying for a house already purchased, while allowing sole proprietors, partnerships and other "owners" of equity in businesses the ability to deduct such State and Local Taxes in full);
• a larger standard deduction but the elimination of personal exemptions;
• a larger child tax credit that only becomes refundable over time (limiting how much it helps the poor) but is available to wealthy households (starting to phase out at half-a-million of income!);
• the only slight reduction in the ability of wealthy individuals to take advantage of the mortgage interest deduction (reducing the debt limit to $750,000 instead of $1,100,000)
• the elimination of the corporate AMT (which cuts taxes for wealthy shareholders/owners/managers) but the retention of the individual AMT (which primarily affects the upper middle class and not the wealthiest taxpayers under the current rate bracket system);
• the elimination of the Affordable Care Act mandate and penalty (which reduces the amount of Medicaid and insurance subsidy funds for poor and middle-income taxpayers, as well as guaranteeing the deconstruction of the health care system for 13 million or more Americans by 2027 and  increasing insurance premiums for upper-middle-class taxpayers); and
• the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to rape by fossil fuel oligarchies (a piddling amount of revenue, but sufficient to buy off the principle-less Sen. Lisa Murkowski from Alaska );
• making the corporate tax changes permanent (and effective without any transition period) while making the individual tax cuts other than benefits for the wealthy like the estate tax changes temporary.
• (just to name a few).

When the health care mandate removal is combined with the other provisions,  "On net, the poor would actually lose out in all years once this effect is taken into account."  Dylan Matthews, The Republican tax bill that could actually become law, explained, Vox.com (Dec. 14, 2017).  The following Tax Policy Center graph from the Vox article (using the Urban-Brookings Microsimulation Model) shows that by 2027 the top 0.1% end up doing much better (average tax cut for the top 0.1 percent is $221,550 a year).  The bottom 20% do worse while the middle--the second and third quintiles--have a very insignificant plus (average tax cut of the third quintile is $490).   Within the third or middle quintile, more than 62% of taxpayers that earn between $54,700 and $93,200 would see their taxes go up, "[b]ut only about 0.1% of the very richest one-thousandth of Americans would see a tax hike."  Id.  Early gains--though small, intended perhaps to benefit the GOP in earlier votes--don't last because the individual cuts aren't permanent.  A change to chained CPI for indexing brackets amounts to a tax increase on individuals, while the permanent corporate tax cuts mean rich and very rich do well while middle and upper-middle lose out. 

 

Maybe the most damnable characteristic of these House and Senate provisions, other than the sheer favoritism for the already wealthy, is the favorable treatment in determining the rate at which income is taxed for "owners" compared to the disfavored treatment for taxation of workers' wages.  As the Tax Policy Center notes, the Senate version of the tax bill "would reduce taxes on business owners, on average, about three times as much as it would reduce taxes on those whose primary source of income is wages or salaries."  Paul Krugman, Republicans Despise the Working Class, NY Times (Dec. 15, 2017), at A27.  And this dissing of the working class goes along with treating partners in real-estate partnerships (like the Trump family and many other real estate developers) with kid gloves:  "a partner in a real estate development firm might get a far bigger tax cut than a surgeon employed by a hospital, even though their income is the same." Krugman, Republicans Despise the Working Class, NY Times (Dec. 15, 2017) (quoting Howard Gleckman at the Tax Policy Center). 

The Vox article describes the pass-through provision as part of its "here's who would be better off" section:

Pass-through companies, like the Trump Organization, which get a new deduction reducing their tax burden. The House-Senate compromise bill allows people with pass-through income to deduct a portion of that income from their taxes; the deduction is reportedly for 20 percent of pass-through income, less than the 23 percent under the Senate-passed bill.  Dylan Matthews, The Republican tax bill that could actually become law, explained, Vox.com (Dec. 14, 2017).

Note that this is an off-the-top reduction of what would otherwise be personal taxable income taxed at the taxpayer's individual tax rate.  Workers who are paid wages get no such break. And wealthy people will use good lawyering and tax planning to organize their businesses so that their income is counted as pass-through income rather than wages. This is just a continuation of a trend of favoring passive ownership of capital in this country.  See, e.g., the Berkeley Blog, Wealthy investors to win bigly with Republican tax plan ( Nov. 9, 2017).

Imagine a company where two siblings as owners and a third sibling is the principal employee.  They all receive about the same income from the company--for the worker bee, as wages and for the other two, as a profit share.  The worker bee does all the creative thinking and working.  So the two owners pay tax under this provision on 20% less income than the worker bee.  And this is true in an economy in which economists are generally agreed that pass-throughs are currently taxed favorably, taking everything into consideration, and "don't need another break".    Dylan Matthews, The Republican tax bill that could actually become law, explained, Vox.com (Dec. 14, 2017).  This pass-through provision is as clear a snubbed nose to all those who work hard to earn a decent living as one can imagine.  Fact is, the "owners" are often the takers, and the "workers" are the makers.

 

PS. The Vox article suggests that the corporate tax break is justifiable, based on the GOP "economic theory" that claims that a lower corporate tax rate will "spark so much additional investment in the United States that it would bid up wages and leave the middle class better off through its indirect effects."  Id.  This is just another way to state the "supply-side" "trickle-down" theory that has been relied on  for decades by right-wingers but has never been shown to be justified empirically.  In 2004, the GOP made the same claim for its "repatriation tax holiday" for multinational corporations, claiming that the low tax would allow those corporations to invest and expand, leading to job creation.  It didn't.  It led, instead, to share buybacks and more money for the shareholders.  In fact, a large number of repatriating corporations that did share buybacks with the money also laid off thousands of workers.

PSS.  The Vox article also suggests that the limitation of the state and local tax deduction for individual taxpayers (but not for businesses) has a "reasonable case" supporting it.  Sure, the benefit of the state and local tax deduction is regressive, in that higher income taxpayers in larger houses with larger property taxes and larger incomes get more of a deduction.  And yes, it tends to benefit those states with higher state income taxes that are used to develop infrastructure and education.  But that misses several points in response.  First, for people at the upper-middle income bracket, the Alternative Minimum Tax generally limits the availability of the state and local tax deduction.  Second, people who currently own homes and are paying taxes on those homes and living in states with higher taxes likely took the availability of a property tax deduction into account in determining what they could pay for their home: the bill does nothing to provide a reasonable transition for these folks that takes their expectations into account.  Third, when the GOP is trying to counter a Democratic president, it always makes the argument that it makes more sense to support states in allowing them to experiment with different ways of raising revenues and supporting their economics.  That's what the "blue" states have done:  they have recognized that having higher taxes allows development of infrastructure, support for education, funding for research and other priorities, and these expenditures have created a more sustainable economy and better standard of living in those states--exactly what the "state experimentation" is supposed to do.  Yet the GOP provision on state and local taxes is now justified as a way to undo the benefit for "rich" states without doing anything to help the "poor" states.  (In fact, Ryan and McConnell have made it clear that their goal is to harm the poor states by reducing funding for Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security on which those states in particular depend.)

 

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Trump's "Give the Rich a Break" Tax Plan

National GOP leaders on Wednesday released a 9-page document that they called a tax "framework" (available here on the Washington Post site) describing in vague terms how they intend to cut taxes for the nation's wealthiest people while doing very little that serves the government needs. Overall, the GOP framework would amount to about $2.2 TRILLION in less revenue to support federal programs (like protecting the environment from corporate pollutants, supporting higher education loans for students, funding basic university research) (assuming $5.8 trillion loss to lowering rates and shift to territorial system and maybe $3.6 trillion recouped by eliminating as yet unspecified deductions).  See GOP proposes deep tax cuts, provides few details on how to pay for them, Washington Post (Sept. 27, 2017).

• They promise 3 rates (12%, 25% and 35%, without stating what the applicable income brackets for those rates should be).  That lowering of rates is primarily beneficial to the wealthiest, since the people who just barely get by on their wages (especially with the new corporate regime of calling people in for short shifts, as needed, rather than paying them a regular full-time job) are hit hardest by the payroll taxes that won't be lowered at all under this plan.  That is, ordinary wage-earners in the middle and lower classes are generally already taxed on a consumption basis--they spend what they earn and have little left for saving for the future.  They pay relative low income taxes but pay significant payroll taxes through withholding on their wages (with no deferral).  This is another excursion into the current GOP's 'alternative fact' universe, where huge tax cuts mainly benefiting the wealthy are sold as a 'simplifying' reform that will benefit ordinary people.

 

• Although the lowest rate is higher than the poorest wage-earning taxpayers pay now, the planners claim that this is still a tax cut because of the "doubling" of the standard deduction for those taxpayers that do not itemize.  However, the personal exemptions are eliminated, so that the combination of the standard deduction and the higher rate is likely to be at best a minimal cut for small families and an actual tax increase for larger families.  See, e.g., this article.

 

• They promise to eliminate the "alternative minimum tax", a tax provision that was enacted as a safety provision to ensure that wealthy taxpayers who can afford tax planning and generally can most easily benefit from the various loopholes and tax subsidies written into the code would pay some modicum of taxes rather than get off scott-free from any tax burden. The "framework" (page 5) claims that "it no longer serves its intended purpose and creates significant complexity."  It is admittedly somewhat complex, but not unduly so with modern tax preparation software which makes that complexity a minimal problem.  I have been required to pay the AMT, and it hasn't made my life or tax return filing more complex.  In fact, the people who owe the AMT should be paying more tax than they would pay without the AMT, and that means it is in fact serving its intended purpose of ensuring that taxpayers cannot aggregate too many of the various haphazard subsidies in the Code to permit them to essentially escape a reasonable tax burden on their economic income.  Elimination of the AMT is a tax break for the well-to-do:  Trump, for example, has had to pay the AMT (real estate developers are one of the much-favored groups in terms of various tax expenditures in the Code that benefit them).

 

• They plan to eliminate the estate tax--a tax that ONLY applies a low 35% rate to individuals who leave estates worth more than 5.5 million dollars or couples that leave estates more than 11 million dollars, and even then is often the only tax that the assets in those estates have ever been subject to, since these wealthy Americans are the ones most able to take advantages of various trusts and other loopholes and borrowing to ensure that they live as tax-free as possible off their assets during their lifetimes and pass them almost wholly intact to their heirs with stepped up basis to start the game all over again.  This is a tax break for the very wealthy and their silver-spooned heirs--especially lucrative for the multibillionaires who own (and live off of) most of the financial assets.

 

• They plan to give corporations an exceeding low statutory rate of 20%, even though the primary beneficiaries will be the owners and managers who already have enjoyed a hugely disproportionate share of corporate gains (compared to their workers) that has resulted in the cascading inequality of distribution of resources in this country, in part because the wealthy typically own most of the countries' financial assets and get a very low preferential capital gains rate on their income compared to the higher rate on wages paid by ordinary, non-wealthy wage-earners.  It is claimed that low corporate tax rates are necessary to allow corporations to be competitive, based on the statement that our statutory rate (the rate provided in section 11 of the Income Tax Code) reaches a maximum of 35% for the biggest companies.  But the majority of corporations--even highly profitable ones-- pay no income tax at all.  And those that do pay a corporate income tax pay an average effective tax rate (actual tax as a percentage of actual economic income) around 24% , at best, and that is not substantially higher than the corporate tax rates in other developed countries.  Further, most of those other developed countries do not depend solely on the income tax--they generally have some kind of value-added tax (a VAT) in addition to income taxes and often have various other taxes (such as a financial transaction tax).  Making claims about competitiveness based solely on the corporate income tax is, in other words, foolishly incommensurate and really says nothing whatsoever about ability to compete.

 

• Further, they plan to allow corporations to expense all investments, at least for the next 5 years, even though the economic reality is that expensing is an upfront subsidy since wear and tear is most significant at the back end of an investment, not the front end.  Expensing (see page 7 of the framework) will cost huge amounts of tax revenues.  It is just a way to reduce corporate taxable income (not economic income) even further, making the 20% rate on a lower amount of income produce even less tax revenues from corporations, which already pay a ridiculously low amount and are enjoying record high profits.

 

• The framework calls for changing to a territorial system (at a time when most U.S. multinationals have already used various gimmicks to 'offshore' their main profit-making IP) and lower taxes on U.S. multinationals.  The result will likely be significantly lower corporate tax payments from U.S. multinationals.  Further, unless the reorganization provisions and ability of U.S. multinationals to move active businesses overseas on a tax free basis is curtailed, these rules will likely encourage other companies to offshore even more of their active business assets.  It will favor multinationals over domestic corporations, pushing even more companies to move businesses overseas.

 

• And they intend to preserve the R&D credit (see page 8 of the framework) -which was eliminated in the 1986 tax reform and then reinstated  on a piecemeal basis over multiple years due to pressures from corporate lobbyists.  There is no evidence that the R&D credit, rather than the more legitimate business deduction or capitalization for research expenses, produces more research.  And Congress has done nothing--in spite of years of pushing for making the R&D credit permanent--to establish that it provides any actual economic growth benefit.   It just provides an upfront dollar for dollar reduction in taxes compared to the deduction's lesser benefit.  And there is no evidence that the credit has resulted in more money being put into research.  Research intensive businesses with good leadership invest in research whether or not they get a special tax benefit because otherwise their busienss will die.  (Of course, businesses with no attention to anything other than the bottom line may make bad decisions:  one reason the pharmacology industry has been lagging is that they have tried to merely buy others' research rather than doing it themselves, and like the infamous purchaser of Epipen, they have simply gorged themselves on exploitative prices because of their monopoly on a particular drug.)

 

• They plan to have income from "pass-through" entities like partnerships taxed at very low rates to the individuals, who already enjoy exceedingly low rates on their gains from corporate stocks and other financial assets (the preferential capital gain rates) and will receive even more cash out of their corporate stock ownership with the even lower proposed statutory rate on corporate stock.  This plan for pass-throughs, by the way, will continue to lavish tax benefits on an already super-coddled wealthy class--those who run real estate development businesses through partnership structures (the Trump empire, for one), those who run hedge funds (some of the wealthiest individuals in the country) and those who run master limited partnerships (fossil fuel tycoons).

 

• They say they will "simplify" taxes--which should mean eliminating most or all of those absurd provisions that have grown over the years to clutter the tax statute with special subsidies (that, again, mostly benefit the wealthy).  But there is no indication that the GOP has any intent to eliminate any of the special giveaways.  With real simplification that made economic sense, the framework would call for things such as
  • eliminating the preferential capital gain rate (that benefits the wealthy who own the vast majority of the capital assets)
  • eliminating the section 1031 "like kind exchange" rules (that allow wealthy real estate developers to trade properties for significant gains but defer tax on those gains indefinitely, often til death when the step up in basis allows their heirs to inherit and start the game all over again)
  • eliminating the various preferences for fossil fuels that have been in the code in one form or another for years, giving oilmen their wealth while subsidizing the most polluting kind of fuel extraction and use (all the while with their lobbyists arguing against significant long-term subsidies for more environmentally friendly wind and solar)
  • phasing out the mortgage interest deduction--at least for mortgages at more than the average national housing price-- so that multimillionaires cannot get the benefit of the interest deduction on $1.1 million of mortgages, again, a provision that primarily benefits the wealthy in the top 20% of the income distribution, and
  • eliminating the provision in the charitable contribution provisions that allows wealthy shareholders to donate certain assets for  a full fair market value deduction rather than a basis deduction--thus significantly reducing the overall income tax they owe.

But of course--although most academic research suggests that a mortgage interest deduction serves no legitimate purpose, the GOP 'six' indicate they will retain it, because it "help[s] accomplish important goals that strengthen civil society as opposed to dependence on government:  home ownership".  Fact is, countries without a mortgage interest deduction have just as high rates of home ownership, and the economic effect of the deduction (especially in its current form) is to favor purchase of ever larger homes by those taxpayers in the upper income distributions.  

As with so much else from the man currently holding the office of President, what is said (paraphrasing) --that the wealthy will not get a tax cut and the poor and middle class will get big tax cuts --can't be trusted.   Like so much else, Trump says he is "very good at it", but then he thinks he is good at everything and is inevitably shown to be fairly ignorant of the issues that matter. The framework, like everything else the GOP has proposed this year --including repeal of the Affordable Care Act; defunding of Medicaid; withdrawal of scientific information about climate change from the EPA website, reduction in the size of existing national monuments meant to protect the land for all of us --is designed to benefit the GOP establishment's wealthiest donors who continue to call the shots on tax and economic policies.

And of course the claim that this 'framework' can result in "the simplicity of a 'postcard' tax filing for the vast majority of Americans" is absurd.  The complexities of accounting for various income sources and the heightened complexities that most low-income Americans face in claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit will remain, even if rates are reduced and the standard deduction replaces the standard deduction and personal exemptions.  The claim (page 4 of the framework) that "typical families in the existing 10% bracket are expected to be better off under the framework due to the larger standard deduction, larger child tax credit and [unspecified] additional tax relief that will be included during the committee process" seems clearly wrong for many if not most of those taxpayers in that lower bracket. 

 And their posturing that this "reform" is to benefit "small businesses" is equally absurd.  The main beneficiaries of the pass-through rate will be the huge joint ventures, master limited partnerships, real estate partnerships (like the Trump companies), and hedge funds whose owners will enjoy a reduction in their tax rate on that income from 39.6% to 25%.  Most actual small business owners are already paying tax around the 25% rate.

The proposal will not end incentives to ship job and capital overseas (see page 3 of the framework on goals)--those gimmicks with transfer pricing of intangibles will continue, as any lowering of the corporate tax rate here to 20%, which is below the international average of 22.5% (according to the report--it may well be too low a figure), will push other countries to lower their rates as well.  It is a corporate lobbyist's ideal playground--playing one country against the other to push the "race to the bottom" faster and faster and continue the quasi-sovereign hegemony of multinational companies around the world.  If we want to end the corporate inversions and the transfer pricing gimmicks, we know various ways we could do that, including changing transfer pricing mechanisms in ways that various academics have recommended.   Congress hasn't really wanted to, since their wealthy corporatist donors wouldn't like it.

What reveals the hypocrisy of the GOP is their sudden switch from deficit hawks during the Obama administration, which made it harder to get a decent stimulus package through Congress and to promote funding for desperately needed infrastructure projects, even when interest rates were incredibly low, to a willingness to incur significant deficits in order to debt- fund even more tax cuts for the wealthy on top of the Bush-era tax cuts that led to a switch from federal surplus to federal deficits and more debt. As Ed Kleinbard so aptly states, "The Republican tax "plan" is a deficit-busting mess, and it would slash the President's taxes", Vox.com (Sept. 28, 2017).

What reveals the GOP hypocrisy even more is their presentation of this framework without any appropriate CBO or Joint Committee on Taxation analysis.  And statements by Senator Bob Corker (Tenn) in connection with scoring tax reform that they don't trust the CBO, implying that the GOP should go to a private (pro-GOP) source for "dynamic scoring" so that it will show the results they want--is truly worrisome.  See The sudden and regrettable demise of the CBO, USNews.com (Sept. 21, 2017).  It disparages the nonpartisan professionals in the Budget Office while showing that the GOP is willing to do practically anything to further the lie that their budget, with  huge tax cuts proposals for the wealthy, will miraculously result in widespread economic growth that will float even poor folks' boats. 

We already know that tax cuts do not have the miraculous growth effect that they claim.  Kansas actually engaged in an "experiment" to prove that tax cuts would stimulate growth.  Even the state's GOP legislature recognized the utter failure of the claim, as the state's economy sank under the burden of the tax cuts.  Kansas actually voted to end the experiment and raise taxes!

And of course we have experimented this way nationally with various Republican administrations.  Reagan cut taxes drastically in his first year in office, caused huge deficits and then increased taxes every year of his term afterwards.  The cuts ended up most especially benefiting the wealthy, because the tax increases took the form of higher payroll taxes and other means of hitting lower-income folks that didn't bother the wealthy.  George H.W. Bush promised not to raise taxes, but recognized that he could not keep that promise and run the government appropriately. If we are going to spend billions on continuing to buy arms and military planes we don't need (a silly idea, but one that seems ingrained in the GOP mentality), then we have to have more money to fund things we really do need, such as a fair medical care system for the most vulnerable (Medicare) and funding for basic research that corporations don't want to pay for (NSF and NIH, among others).  George W. Bush cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations, fulfilling corporate lobbyists wish lists that had been circulating for 20 years, including creating a 'tax holiday' for corporations to repatriate untaxed profits that they had offshored at a very low rate.  All that was promised to drive economic growth, but of course it didn't.  As with the similar idea in this year's "reform" talk, the 2004 tax holiday provided a way for corporations that had engaged in various gimmicks to move their profits overseas to low tax jurisdictions (even while the money is often in U.S. banks) to bring it back to the US at low or no taxes and then use it to do stock buybacks that benefited their wealthy shareholders with big boosts of income taxed at preferential capital gains rates.  Most of those corporations did not use those funds in any way to create job--in fact, some of the biggest so-called repatriators laid off employees at the same time.  The tax holiday merely gave even more of a tax subsidy to unpatriotic corporations that were willing to scam the system by pretending to sell their invaluable IP to offshore subsidiaries, and then even higher payments to the CEOs for raking in more cash.  In other words, the tax holiday was a great exercise in supporting the creation of an even greater inequality gap.  Historical trends are fairly clear on this.  The U.S. economy has thrived more under Democratic presidents who have increased taxes and has turned to deficits more under Republican presidents who have cut taxes.

What we should do at a minimum is increase the amount that corporations pay into the federal government, so that a higher percentage of our GDP is paid in corporate taxes, as in other developed countries.  And we should add a financial transactions tax, at least, to the mix while eliminating the preferential capital gains rate and the like-kind exchange provision. 

Funding the government so that it can deal with the hundreds of billions in financial aid needed in Texas (Hurricane Harvey) and Florida (Hurricane Irma) and Puerto Rico (Hurricanes Irma and Maria) while at the same time starting to handle some of the deteriorating federal roads, railways, bridges and other infrastructure throughout the country would be the best way to ensure that we could continue the economic growth begun under the Obama administration. That funding would require REAL tax reform:  eliminating the preferential capital gains rate, eliminating the many loopholes by which highly profitable corporations manage to pay almost no federal income tax, and creating a significantly higher graduated rate structure for taxing estates (while eliminating the step up in basis).

(Of course, we should also recognize that spending the hundreds of billions annually on defense does much less to defend America and make it great than spending a higher proportion of that money on education, infrastructure, and other ways to increase opportunities for all.  Let's get rid of the militaristic jingoism that keeps the U.S. armament industry rolling in cash and start funding scientific and health research through NSF and NIH.  That is the way we created a thriving middle class after the second World War and the way to support continuing innovations that will make a difference in our lives and economy into the future.)

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FATCA Agreement with France

On November 14, the US Treasury Department announced that it had signed an agreement with France relating to the implementation of the 2010 Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) law.  That makes the 10th such agreement signed between the US and other countries to date, and helps move the law towards smoother implementation.

The purpose of FATCA is to cut tax avoidance by increasing transparency--especially in the case of offshore bank accounts that have, in the past, served as key mechanisms for avoiding taxation.

It requires U.S. financial institutions to withhold a portion of payments made to foreign financial institutions (FFIs) who do not agree to identify and report information on U.S. account holders.  FFIs have the option of entering into agreements directly with the IRS, or through one of two alternative Model IGAs signed by their home country.  The IGA between the United States and France is the Model 1A version, meaning that FFIs in France will be required to report tax information about U.S. account holders directly to the French government, which will in turn relay that information to the IRS.  The IRS will reciprocate with similar information about French account holders. Id.

Treasury officials praised the French government for its support in the effort to implement FATCA.

"France has been an enthusiastic supporter of our effort to promote global tax transparency and critical to drafting a model of FATCA implementation," said Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Tax Affairs Robert B. Stack.  "This agreement demonstrates the growing global momentum behind FATCA and strong support from the world's most important economies."  Id.

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Bloomberg reports (in a minimal news story at this point based on an anonymous tip prior to the settlement being officially released) that the United States and Switzerland have reached an agreement that settles the dispute about Americans' use of Swiss banking secrecy to evade US taxation of undeclared accounts.

Apparently, the deal will result in some banks being permitted to voluntarily disclose activity, while others will face penalties because of undeclared assets. 

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Reich is Right: It's only lies that support corporate tax reform

Robert Reich says that Obama's offer to trade increased infrastructure investment for corporate tax reduction is foolish.  He's right.  The US has been lowering corporate taxes, through one industry-favorable tax expenditure after another, for decades.  Corporate taxes as a percent of GDP have gone down, down, down, while corporations (through ALEC) write legislation to please themselves, fund 501(c)(4) groups to campaign for more corporate favoritism, offshore jobs, offshore profits from intangible properties, and generally thumb their noses at the nation and its citizens.

Reich provides a succinct description of the three main lies that the corporate lobby has been pushing for decades to deceive Americans into support corporate tax "reform" (read--revenue reduction provisions).  Reich,  Three Biggest Lies Why Corporate Taxes Should be Lowered, Salon.com (Aug. 5, 2013).

Lie #1: U.S. corporate tax rates are higher than the tax rates of other big economies. 

As Reich notes, the Congressional Research Service did a study recently that demonstrates that US corporations are in fact taxed less than the average rate for OECD nations.  The CRS study showed a US effective tax rate of 27.1%, compared to an average OECD rate of 27.7%. 

 

Lie #2: U.S. corporations need lower taxes in order to make investments in new jobs.

Again, Reich points out the obvious.  US corporations have so much cash they don't know what to do with it--with more than $2 trillion sitting in bank accounts (not yet repatriated for tax purposes, even though much of it is in US banks).  It isn't lower taxes/more cash that is needed for them to create jobs; it is more customers!  The declining wages of American workers (caused by the outsouring of US jobs and the cutthroat anti-labor policies of the Walmarts and other US corporations that treat workers as expendible commodities) has meant slow growth of demand, and without demand corporations will not produce more and without increased production, jobs won't be created.

 

Lie #3: U.S. corporations need a tax break in order to be globally competitive. 

This is the lie that really gets me.  As Reich says, its pure "baloney."  US corporations are already competitive--they create jobs offshore, do R&D offshore, and serve global customers offshore.  They don't need a US tax break to do that!

Even if a US tax break would help them do that (everybody likes more money in their pockets), it wouldn't do any good to anyone here in the US.  It would only serve the owners and managers of the corporations, not American workers.  There is no justification whatsoever for redistribution upwards (to global owners/managers of multinational corporations) to support outsourcing of US jobs and impoverishment of US families.

 

 

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Offshoring profits with captive reinsurance

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Corporations Never Had It So Good

If only we really had a liberal media, everyone would know about corporate outsourcing, then why would anyone think tax reform should mean tax breaks for multinationals?

The Daily Kos has a good "buzz" list of the "!5 Things Everyone Would Know if We Really Had a Liberal Media".  Here's Number One:

1. Where the jobs went.

Outsourcing (or offshoring) is a bigger contributor to unemployment in the U.S. than laziness.

Since 2000, U.S. multinationals have cut 2.9 million jobs here while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg as multinational corporations account for only about 20% of the labor force.

When was the last time you saw a front-page headline about outsourcing?

Source: Wall Street Journal via Think Progress.

 

 

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Offshoring profits with captive reinsurance

One of the ways that corporations manage to cut their federal income tax bills way, way below the statutory rate is by setting up reinsurance affiliates offshore.  While some of these reinsurance affiliates may actually function as full-service reinsurance companies to many different customers, those truly taking on and diversifying risk, most are scams, in that they are just ways to offshore U.S. profits through premium payments for self-insurance.

Two bills now before Congress, H.R. 2054 and S.991, reintroduced recently by Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA), Rep. Bill Pascrell(D-NJ) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), are intended to end this run around the US corporate tax laws, picking up a proposal from the President's  FY2014 budget to deny tax deductions for certain reinsurance premiums paid to foreign-based affiliates of domestic insurers.

Naturally, the GOP-Big-Business-Friendly machine is up in arms about any bill that would take away this kind of tax subsidy for multinational corporations. 

[Although the GOP professes to believe in a 'free market', that is demonstrably false, in that every preferential tax subsidy for Big Business is highly lobbied for, and at the same time, "reforms" (like further preferential capital gains rates or regressive consumption taxes) that would push the burden of supporting federal government programs that are immensely important for ordinary people are pushed.]

So GOP Governor Rick Scott of Florida has issued a letter to Congressman Vern Buchanan (R-FL), a member of the US House of RepresentativesWays and Means Committee (who had been involved in various lucrative real estate gambits that smacked of crony capitalism in the time before his elevation to congressman). Gov. Scott claims that legislation that gets rid of the loophole of deducting premiums paid to a corporation's own offshore (tax haven) subsidiary is just a terrible idea.  Gee, it would increase costs and that would be "disastrous."  He also cites a Brattle Group "study" that claims that insurance availability would decrease by 20%.  He also makes various claims about the importance of reinsurance generally as part of the insurance market.

Scott's letter seems to mix up questions about general reinsurance versus the kind of reinsurance to offshore affiliates that the legislation is targeting.  Reinsurance occurs when an insurance company seeks to diversity its risks by reinsuring part of them with another insurance company that acts as a reinsurer.  Genuine reinsurance is a useful part of insurance, and the legislation doesn't outlaw reinsurance or add to the costs of reinsuring through  bona fide third-party reinsurance companies.  The legislation deals with offshoring of insurance premiums through affiliated reinsurers, quite a different thing, through which US corporations essentially convert US profits to offshore profits, reducing their US taxes correspondingly, by paying premiums (sometimes exaggeratedly high premiums, providing even greater tax avoidance) to their own subsidiaires located in offshore tax havens.

Yes, not getting to use the offshoring reinsurance scam to cut US corporate taxes would increase those companies' costs.  But every time a US company reduces its own costs and increase its own profits through offshoring its profits to tax havens and thus avoiding US taxes, it is shifting the tax burden off onto ordinary Americans who can't/don't engage in such lucrative offshoring.  Ordinary workers thus end up bearing an increased tax load to support those companies' lower tax burdens. 

(Oh, and a bunch of reinsurers appear to have been involved in illegal trade with Iran, too.  See article on NY regulators, below).

The US has prospered most when we have had a more equal society  in which corporate entities have borne a greater share of the tax burden (resulting, if the incidence of tax falls mainly on shareholders as may be the case) in their shareholders, who are in the main members of the upper crust, paying a fairer share of the tax burden and relieving ordinary folk from having to take up too big a share. 

It seems to me that we have reached a point where Americans have to decide what kind of society they want.  If we want a highly unequal society in which children of the wealthy receive a prime education, go to the best colleges, are introduced through their wealthy parents to societal leaders who can open doors for them in whatever career they want while most everybody else finds themselves forced to opt for expensive online colleges, few connections, living from hand to mouth and hoping against hope to be able to satisfy basic needs, then we can just continue on the path we are already moving on.  But if we are not satisfied with that kind of oligarchic society, we have to vote out the right-wingers who are pushing it and institute new policies, reviving labor laws to support workers, instituting a more progressive income tax, reforming the tax code to remove the many tax subsidies for Big Business (and especially those for Big Finance and Big Oil) and otherwise attempt to shift the focus of the economy to creating jobs for ordinary people.  Revamping the reinsurance industry is one of the obvious reforms along the way to a more sustainable economy.

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UK Territories to sign OECD Tax Info-Sharing Agreement, Reveal Beneficial Owners

The UK's David Cameron announced  that Britain's 10 crown dependencies and overseas territories--Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Jersey, Gilbraltar, Anguilla, Turks and Caicos Islands, Guernsey, Isle of Man, and the British Virgin Islands--would sign on to the OECD's multilateral convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters.  They also agreed to "produce action plans about providing information on who owns which companies and who benefits, the so-called beneficial ownership."  Wall St.J., June 17, 2013, at C3.

While many vacationers may know most of these spots because of their location in tropical paradises, most tax practitioners recognize them as key linchpins in tax avoidance plans of many wealthy individuals, banks and corporations.  As many as 18,000 corporate offices are located in mailboxes in a three-story building in the Caymans, all with a few Cayman laywers as their principal directors. And of course one of the reasons these tax-haven countries are in demand is that they have both very low taxes and a good deal of secrecy about just who owns what.

Signing the OECD tax convention won't solve all the many problems that revolve around tax haven and banking secrecy jurisdictions.  The exchange of information provisions, while an advance over no agreement to exchange information, are still far too difficult to bring into play without having some information about owners and account holders.

But getting these tax haven jurisdictions on board the convention is a first step in the right direction, just as the signing of the convention by other tax haven and banking secrecy jurisdictions like Singapore earlier this year was.  One can't help hoping that it is a signal that these tax haven countries realize that tax secrecy ultimately will not be a great way to maintain a stable economy and they will eventually need to produce something useful besides tax avoidance regimes.

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Apple's Tax Rates--just what does Cook's "way I look at this" mean???

There's been a good bit in the news lately about the way multinational enterprises like Apple, Google, and many others especially in Big Pharm and Big IP actively reduce their US taxes through offshoring that is offshoring-on-paper-only to a large extent.  Apple does it by "selling" rights to its innovative IT developments to affiliated offshore entities (such as those in Ireland), and then claims that the profits from those US-based innovations are not US-income.  In Apple's case, the main holding company in Ireland is run by directors in California (except for one woman who actually resides in Ireland but doesn't attend many meetings--and most of those by phone) and isn't even treated as a resident in Ireland for Irish tax purposes.  See, e.g., How one Irish woman made $22bn for Apple in one year, The Guardian (May 29, 2013) [hat tip to Stevan].

That's a feat that shouldn't be achievable by any company but is a result of the lack of international harmonization in the way tax laws work and the failure of Congress to keep up with the innovations in tax law achieved by creative tax lawyers taking advantage of every discernible loophole or ambiguity.  It may be legal (under our foolhardy current law that fails to treat corporations organized OR MANAGED in the US as US companies) or it may not be, depending on how willing a court would be to apply the "sham" corporation doctrine to the case.  Either way, it doesn't sit very well that a company that benefited enormously from the way the US subsidizes the education (especially of the rich who pursue science careers) and research is so willing to show so little social responsibility.  Congress should likely act on that, and soon, so that US MNEs do not continue to siphon out US profits to nowhere.   

Even much of the ballyhoo about corporations that really "want" to repatriate their overseas profit but are "hindered" by the US taxes they would have to pay is ridiculous--they already keep most of those profits in the US in bank accounts and Treasuries, but don't claim them to be repatriated for their businesses.....

Victor Fleischer, a fellow tax prof, did a DealBook story on this last week that is worth noting.  Fleischer, Calculating Apple's True Tax Rate, New York Times, DealBook (June 4, 2013). 

As he says at the very beginning, it isn't easy to know what the actual tax amount paid (and hence tax rate) of big MNEs  is:  "it depends on what the meaning of 'pays' is."

Now, what you have to understand is that this comes in the context of Apple CEO Cook's testimony at congressional hearing as to that very piece of information.  “The way I look at this is that Apple pays 30.5 percent of its profits in taxes in the United States.”  Id. (emphasis added).  One has to wonder about that qualifier--"the way I look at this is", instead of a plain statement about Apple's payments of taxes to the United States Treasury.  For example, one wonders "which profits" Apple is using.  It all depends, doesn't it, on whether Cook is counting as US income everything that should be counted as US income?  In the case of many discussions of MNE tax liabilities, there is also a question of whether they are talking about taxes that the company has booked (as "deferred tax liabilities" that are someday, maybe, due and payable), though the Fleischer story says that was not the case with Cook's statement.  Often you have to also ask whether the tax rate calculated as "paid" to the United States is based on tax liabilities that are offset by foreign tax credits (and thus not actually paid to the United States)--which would ordinarily be the case with most MNEs.

As Bloomberg News highlighted recently, Mr. Cook’s calculation is based on a badly distorted measure of United States income. ...  Apple shifts substantial amounts of its economic profits from the United States to Ireland, where they are taxed at a rate close to zero. Those profits are then sheltered in Ireland and untaxed unless Apple decides to bring the cash back to the United States.

We can't easily figure out how much an MNE actually pays, because of a rather silly view that corporations merit having their tax returns kept fully confidential.  Looking through publicly disclosed information, including financial statements, sometimes is revealing, but only after hard work and not often with certainty about the conclusions, as Fleisher notes.  Felix Salmon of Reuters has suggested public companies should file their tax returns with their other information filed with the SEC.  Id. Instead, they currently file all kinds of statements prepared assiduously by lawyers to hide their tax avoidance strategies from the IRS and to hide their actual tax situation from everybody.  Obviously, they don't want to disclose their tax returns, but it is hard to see why that would be a bad thing to require.  We require open disclosure of Form 990 for 501(c)(3) organizations to justify their tax breaks, and MNEs get tax breaks of a much greater magnitude than most 501(c)(3)s.

Fleisher has a more modest proposal--require all public companies to disclose their "true US tax rate", defined as cash payments made to the U.S. Treasury divided by worldwide pre-tax income. If you calculate that rate over three years for Apple, it's a heck of a lot less than Cook says is "the way [he] look[s] at this"--only 8.2% ($5.3 billion paid to the U.S. Treasury from 2009-2011 OVER $65 billion worldwide pre-tax profits).  Id.

The point of the disclosure is to allow voters and policy makers an easy way to understand how well the tax system is working and what each corporation contributes to the public coffers. Id.

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tax breaks for wealthy; corporate tax shouldn't be reformed away; seed patents are a real scandal

No time for lengthy commentary today, but worth calling attention to some noteworthy items.

(1)  The CBO released a new report detailing the income groups that benefit most from the various tax expenditures in the internal revenue code. No surprise that it finds that those in the highest income brackets receive an enormous amount of (not-needed) money from these tax subsidies.  

As one blog put it: "a whopping $2 trillion of that goes to folks who make more than $450,000 a year. In other words, 17 percent of all tax breaks goes to the top 1 percent. $2 trillion is about double the 10-year cost of the sequester." Bill Scher, $2 Trillion Wasted in Tax Breaks for Wealthy, Campaign for America's Future.org (May 30, 2013).

The wealthy enjoy tax breaks that have no relation to anything they produce but do relate to the fact that they are the primary owners of financial assets, such as the preferential rate for capital gains and the preferential rate for corporate dividends.  They also benefit much much more from any tax break they get than others do, especially when it comes to the mortgage interest deduction, the charitable contribution deduction or the exclusion for interest on tax-exempt bonds.  That's because they have more expensive homes, get bigger mortgages, have more financial assets that they can contribute to their pet projects for a FULL deduction of value (not just, as with most other property contributions, for their actual investment), and are about the only purchasers of tax-exempt bonds (the rates for which are generally set to attract the wealthiest buyers) and always itemize, whereas 70% of Americans just take the standard deduction. 

This $2 trillion is an economic waste--for some, its just more money to "invest" in offshore bank accounts and tax scams; for others, it just feeds Wall Street's private equity funds and "private banks" with more cash for casino capitalism bets and takeover gambles. As John Kominitsky, a commenter on the blog, notes "This is the "capital" Wall Street sucks up to fuel their Speculation Casino of derivatives (CDO's) high-speed computer trading, outsized "executive bonuses", and tax dodging off-shore accounts."  So the tax breaks for the wealthy (costly to ordinary Americans who have to make up the tax money needed) feeds the Wall Street casino capitalism monster (costly to ordinary Americans who lose their homes and livelihoods as Wall Street banks require bailouts and private equity firms make megaprofits off firing people).

 (2) The New York Times is on a roll on tax issues, seemingly reading more deeply than it had been doing for a while.  Today's editorial makes the valid point that there is no justification in today's economy for abolishing corporate taxes even if they were replaced with something else.  See editorial, No replacement for corporate taxes: the system needs to be reformed, not abolished, New York Times (May 31, 2013).

The editorial calls the "tax cut crowd" out on one of the arguments I've lambasted here for years--the idea pushed by corporate lobbyists (and people like Tim Cook in his recent congressional testimony) that since there is a good deal of corporate tax avoidance, we should just cut corporate taxes way back or even eliminate the corporate tax altogether, since we'll "obviously" never get sophisticated companies to pay more.This is wacky.  Rewarding tax avoidance by eliminating the broken corporate tax system altogether gets it backwards, as the Times notes.  The editorial makes six important points.

1. the corporate share of taxes has steadily declined, while corporations' use of the good things that the nation provides--the "social and economic foundation on which corporate success is built"--continues apace.
2. Ending the corporate tax just rewards the wealthy even more (who own most of corporate stock) and results in heavier burdens on everybody else

And, I would add, everybody else will carry that burden either by paying a larger share of taxes paid or by suffering from reduction in government services of particular importance to them, such as lower funding for education, for aid to the poor, for research, etc.   The wealthy can buy themsevles whatever they want, so are now more willing to let government shrivel.

3. cutting out corporate taxes means increasing the deficit

4. There's no justification for cutting out corporate taxes in order to replace that system with another one, like a value added tax.  That implies that it is reasonable to favor publicly traded corporations with all the benefits of US government without any of the obligations to pay for that benefit.

This is particularly unreasonable given the Supremes' decision that corporations have a right to spend their money to influence election campaigns for real people, and the right-wing's attempt to make a scandal out of the IRS scrutiny of groups that use 501(c)(4) status to conduct politicking in order not to have to reveal their donors, frequently major corporate owners like the Koch brothers and MNEs like Exxon Mobil. The idea of eliminating corporate taxes and passing the burden to less able to pay individuals is just another piece of the corporatist, class warfare agenda.

5. It also doesn't make sense to scrap corporate taxes if we decide to get rid of the preferential rate for dividends.  There is ample reason for raising the tax rate on capital investment income--it mostly goes to the wealthy, so the preferential rates for the wealthy exacerbates the growing inequality in this country, though, as the article notes, there is little political will even among Democrats to set the system aright.  But even so, eliminating the capital gains preference doesn't support eliminating the corporate tax--corporations don't have to pay dividends and shareholders get to choose when to realize taxable gains. Getting rid of the corporate tax would exacerbate the problem of corporations and shareholders controlling tax revenues through personal decisions.

6. We do need to reform corporate taxes--to prevent the ability of MNEs like Apple, Google and GE to pay ridiculously low or no US corporate taxes.  And that needs global cooperation.  So in the meantime we should require country by country reporting of profits and taxes.

 (3) This last item isn't a tax item, but it is something that is just about as pervasive as tax issues in our lives--the question of whether corporate giants should be allowed to "own" patents on living organisms, especially on self-replicating living organisms like seeds. 

I think the Supreme Court's recent decision in the Monsanto case is wrong. The current policy represents corporatism gone viral: it leaves farmers dependent on the few chemical giants that own the original genetically modified seed and all seeds that plants that sprout from it make.  It rips profits from farmers' hands and puts them in the hands of managers and shareholders of Monsanto and companies like it--a kind of class warfare by proxy. It leaves our agriculture, and our environment, at the mercy of a big corporation that has been steadily pushing us to overuse poisonous pesticides and herbicides that ruin our air, our water, and our land.  Congress needs to act to undo this patent determination.  See Kristina Hubbard, Monsanto's Growing Monopoly: what the Supreme Court got wrong: patents on self-replicating seed are unethical, dangerous and anti-competitive, Salon.com (May 30, 2013).

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