Archive for the ‘taxes’ Category
Not Dead Yet
Feb26
By John Feehery
Originally published in The Hill.
I would put the chances of comprehensive tax reform at 50-50.
I know that sounds wildly optimistic, given the raw partisanship that currently infects Washington, but the more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that tax reform is the only solution to our budget problems.
Here are six reasons why tax reformers have more than a fighting chance to be successful in this Congress:1. Reform brings in revenue. If pro-growth reform is done correctly, it can spur increased economic activity, create more jobs, get more people off welfare and bring a trillion dollars into America from overseas. The trick is to make certain that whatever loopholes you close don’t kill jobs at the same time. That’s why policymakers have to be very careful that their reforms don’t kill critical industries like housing. But almost every economist believes that a simpler, smarter tax code will be good for economic growth and, eventually, very good for increased revenues.
2. Reform is good politics. The president has turned his attention away from attacking the rich and toward attacking tax loopholes. The White House doesn’t make strategic decisions like that unless it has plenty of polling data to back it up. And polls show that the American people want a tax code that is simpler, flatter and less likely to give special breaks to tax avoiders.
3. Reform is good for Max Baucus. The Senate Finance chairman faces a tough election in red-state Montana. Nothing would help him fend off a challenge better than an accomplishment like tax reform. Moving on tax reform will undoubtedly help him to raise campaign cash, but it will also give him an opportunity to take care of home state concerns.
4. Reform is important to Dave Camp. The House Ways and Means Committee chairman is a smart policy wonk who has made tax reform his version of the Holy Grail. Camp, who recently overcame a serious health scare, has renewed his focus on the dysfunctional tax code and his plans to fix it. Under his leadership, his committee has held countless hearings on things like the charitable tax breaks, tax extenders and other aspects of the tax code, all with an eye toward reform. Camp wants this, and despite some misgivings from the GOP leadership, he is moving full-speed ahead.
5. Reform will burnish the Obama legacy. When Ronald Reagan signed into law tax reform in 1986, he solidified his reputation as a transformational president. President Obama, who carefully studied Reagan before taking office, is worried about his legacy, like all second-term presidents. Fundamentally reforming the tax code would be quite a feather in his cap.
6. Reform is the missing piece of the puzzle. The only way to a grand bargain is through tax reform. Only tax reform brings in the revenue needed to satisfy the president. Only tax reform lowers tax rates enough for Republicans to be satisfied that it is the right policy. Only tax reform satisfies liberals who want big business to pay more and conservatives who want small businesses to pay less. And only through tax reform can Republicans and the president come to the table on entitlement reforms.
A friend of mine who works on tax issues for a living said that cooking tax reform is kind of like cooking barbeque. You can have hot, medium or mild reform — hot being fundamental, comprehensive reform with rate simplification and base broadening, medium being focused solely on corporate tax reform and mild being focused solely on tax simplification.
In my view, only tax reform with all of the hot sauce will create the spark needed to get this economy going again. But the hotter the sauce, the deeper the indigestion for some in Washington.
At the end of the day, that indigestion might prove to be unsustainable for policymakers, and they might choose instead to limp along from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis.
That’s why I rate tax reform at best as a 50-50 proposition. It’s not dead, but it’s not a sure thing, either.
Hard Work and Taxes
Jan28
By John Feehery
I was watching the Australian Open Finals yesterday morning. Andy Murray from Great Britain was playing Novak Djokovic of Monte Carlo.
Monte Carlo? I thought the number one ranked player in the world was from Belgrade, Serbia. Turns out, Mr. Djokovic moved to the low-tax haven on Monte Carlo because, well, he didn’t want to pay enormously high taxes.
Andy Murray, one of the top British players in history and a rising star, doesn’t have to move to Monte Carlo because Great Britain has a reasonable tax rate, so reasonable that Carla Bruni’s husband, Mr. Sarkozy, the former French Prime Minister, is trying to move there. He wants to avoid the confiscatory tax rates imposed by his successor.
High taxes became an issue in America, too.
California has become America’s version of France (or Serbia, for that matter). Phil Mickelson, the famous golfer, recently bitterly complained about California’s new super-tax on the super-wealthy. He now if forced to pay about 65% of his income to the folks in Sacramento, San Diego and Washington D.C.
My guess is that he will follow Tiger, who long ago moved his operations to Florida, where they don’t have a State Income tax, and they won’t as long as Republicans are running the Sunshine State.
Talking of states, there is a great debate among the states about scrapping the state income tax altogether. If you are California, New York and Illinois, you keep raising the state income taxes because you need more money because you won’t fix your fix pension problems. If you are Florida or Texas or maybe Kansas, you want to attract the Phil Mickelsons of the world (talented entrepreneurs who don’t want to hand most of their money over to the government), so you keep your taxes low, keep them confined to a sales tax, and you scrap or never ever threaten to impose a state income tax.
Ireland got into a mess because it decidedly to bail out the bad behavior of European banks, and put the bill on the backs of its citizens. So, it cut the hell out of spending and it has been a couple of tough years in the Old Sod. What it didn’t do was raise corporate taxes, and now Ireland is poised to be the first of the PIGS countries to pull out of its financial crisis. Why? Because corporations like to do business where they don’t have to pay confiscatory taxes.
I don’t know why the Democrats never get this. A pig gets fat, while a hog get slaughtered. You make taxes too high and people (especially the kind of people who create jobs for other people), go somewhere else and do something else.
Djokovic won his match. Now he can spend his prize money at the casinos of Monte Carlo (which are very nice, by the way) and not worry that it will taken away by some greedy politician in Belgrade.
