"TAX EXTENDERS" BILL THE LATEST TEST
OF CONGRESS’S COMMITMENT TO FISCAL DISCIPLINE
“Tax extenders” legislation now before the Senate
has become the latest battleground in the intensifying debate over whether
Congress should abide by its “pay-as-you-go” (PAYGO) rules and pay for new tax
and budget measures so they don’t expand the deficit. Opposition to
abiding by PAYGO is also impeding congressional action to extend Alternative
Minimum Tax relief and to avert a scheduled cut in Medicare payments to doctors,
and it will be central to the coming debate over extending the 2001 and 2003 tax
cuts.
Unfortunately, key congressional Republicans are now arguing that
any extension of existing tax provisions should be deficit financed, on
principle. This claim will make it much tougher for Congress to live up
to its pledge of fiscal discipline and could ultimately lead to multi-trillion
dollar increases in the national debt.
Congress
should pay for the tax extenders, as its budget rules require.
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On May 21, the House adopted legislation
extending for one year various tax cuts that expired at the end of 2007,
including the Research and Development Tax Credit, the state and local sales
tax deduction, and the tuition deduction. The legislation does not add
to deficits because it fully offsets the cost of these provisions (as well
as other tax cuts it contains
-
If enacted without offsets, the tax cuts in the
House-passed extenders bill would add $54 billion to deficits and debt.
Moreover, failure to pay for this year’s extenders bill could set a
precedent for further unpaid-for extensions of these provisions, which could
add as much as $500 billion to deficits and debt over the next decade.
Arguments against applying PAYGO to the
extenders bill do not withstand scrutiny.
- Congressional
Republican leaders and the Administration argue that all extensions of expiring
tax provisions should be exempt from PAYGO rules. They also argue that no
expiring tax cuts should be allowed to expire. Adopting these two principles
would add more than $4 trillion to deficits over just the next ten years.
- Adopting the principle that extensions of
expiring tax provisions need not be paid for would also encourage policymakers
to create even more new “extenders.” Supporters of new tax cuts would
know that, if they could just enact these tax cuts for as short a period as
one year, the tax cuts could then be made permanent without any offsets.
This could lead to an even greater explosion in temporary tax provisions than
has already occurred and to even larger increases in deficits and debt.
- Last fall,
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that to offset the cost of
extending expiring tax provisions would be “offensive” to Senate Republicans.
This position — that extensions of tax provisions should be deficit financed
as a matter of principle — is difficult to comprehend. It implies, for
example, that even if Senate Republicans support a particular
revenue-raising measure, they will oppose using it to pay for extending a
tax provision.
The offsets in the House-passed bill are
reasonable policy.
- One offset would close a loophole that allows
wealthy hedge fund managers and certain other individuals to avoid paying tax
on deferred compensation they shelter in offshore tax havens. In the
past, senators of both parties have recognized that the deferred compensation
rules are being abused and have voted to impose limits on deferred
compensation. The House bill takes a different approach: it simply
requires individuals to pay U.S. income tax on deferred compensation paid by
tax-haven based corporations.
- The other offset in the bill would effectively
roll back a tax cut for multinational corporations that was enacted in 2004
but has not yet taken effect. The 2004 provision (known as “worldwide
interest allocation”) allows firms to use a more favorable formula for
apportioning certain tax deductions between U.S. and foreign income.
- The tax code already
treats firms operating abroad very generously. In fact, the current tax system
appears, on average, to subsidize U.S. firms operating abroad: the Joint
Committee on Taxation has estimated that fully exempting the foreign earnings of
U.S. firms from tax would actually raise revenue. This is in large part
because current law effectively allows multinational firms to defer tax on their
foreign earnings indefinitely while still claiming immediate tax deductions for
foreign business expenses they incur in generating these earnings; they are able
to apply these deductions to reduce tax on their U.S. earnings. The
2004 provision would make the tax treatment of multinational corporations even
more generous, without addressing any of the opportunities for tax avoidance the
current tax rules create.
- Much of the
business community itself appears to believe that the offsets in the House bill
would have little impact on business activity and are reasonable as part of the
overall legislation. In fact, some in the business community have expressed
resentment of Senate policymakers who oppose the House-passed offsets and plan
to block extension of “extenders” legislation that includes these or other
offsets. As one lobbyist told Congress Daily, “A number of
companies are expressing a certain resentment that they’re going to [lose tax
benefits like the Research and Development Tax Credit] in the name of
protecting hedge funds.” Such comments from business lobbyists suggest
that much of the opposition to the House offsets stems from the Republican
leadership’s commitment never to pay for any tax-cut extensions, rather than
from concerns about the particular measures in the House bill.
In the future, Congress should subject the
extenders to greater scrutiny.
- The tax
extenders have become more expensive each year as Congress enacts new
“temporary” tax cuts with no intention of letting them expire. The
overwhelming majority of the expiring provision in this year’s extenders bill
were enacted since 2001.
- At last fall’s markup of a similar
extenders bill, Ways and Means Committee Chair Charles Rangel called for a
comprehensive reevaluation of the tax extenders to see which were achieving
their goals and should be made permanent and which should be allowed to
expire. Such a review would be highly desirable. In the
meantime, given that the President and lawmakers of both parties support
continuing the now-expired tax extenders through 2008, it is important that
Congress offset the cost.
End Note:
[1]
For example, the House-passed bill includes an important improvement in the
refundable Child Tax Credit; see Aviva Aron-Dine, “Improving the Refundable
Child Tax Credit,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, revised May 19,
2008,
https://www.cbpp.org/10-24-07tax.htm.
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The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization and policy institute that conducts research and analysis on a range of government policies and programs. It is supported primarily by foundation grants. |