Impact of President Obama's tax reform

[ProSense]

Via EPI:

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The president’s recommendations for the Joint Select Committee

The president offered a comprehensive backup plan to raise $1.6 trillion should Congress fail to raise $1.5 trillion through comprehensive tax reform. Roughly half of this revenue ($760 billion) would come from allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to expire for households earning more than $250,000. The estate tax would also be reinstated at 2009 exemptions and rate.5 The proposed offsets for the American Jobs Act make up another $479 billion, including $410 billion from capping the value of tax expenditures for upper-income households, nearly $13 billion from eliminating the carried-interest loophole, and over $41 billion from eliminating tax carve-outs for the oil and gas industries. Closing other business loopholes (such as those related to inventory accounting), reforming the international tax system, and reinstating Superfund taxes for toxic waste cleanup account for most of the remaining $228 billion of revenue (see Table 1).



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Distributional impact of the president’s recommendations

Based on distributional analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the president’s recommendations for the Joint Select Committee would raise revenues from high-income individuals while reducing or leaving unchanged taxes for the vast majority of taxpayers. Relative to current tax policy, over 95 percent of all the tax increases would be borne by the highest-income 5 percent of households—those with incomes above $227,000 (TPC 2011d).22 Millionaires would bear over two-thirds of the tax changes; their effective tax rates would rise 5.5 percentage points to 38.4 percent (TPC 2011e).23 At the same, the tax provisions of the American Jobs Act would, on average, slightly lower taxes for the bottom 60 percent of earners—those with income below $65,000 (TPC 2011d). Relative to current law (i.e., all the Bush-era tax cuts expire on schedule), however, households earning less than $1 million would, on average, receive a tax cut. Households with over $1 million in income would see an average tax increase of $29,000, raising their effective tax rate by 0.9 percentage points relative to current law (TPC 2011f). In light of the transfer of wealth to upper-income households through the tax policies of the last decade, this modest increase seems appropriate. In 2010, households with over $1 million in income received on average $168,000 from the 2001-08 tax cuts (TPC 2008a), lowering their average tax rate by 5.1 percentage points, all of which was deficit financed.

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That's what sane reform looks like!

[indepat]

1. Rethuglicans will jump on the bandwagon to raise taxes on the wealthy. Yeah, they'll likely

jump on that bandwagon from the git-go. :patriot:

[Andy823]

2. K&R

Great post, and as you said it's "SANE" reform, not taking from the poor, elderly, veterans, education etc. while give MORE tax breaks to corporations and the rich!

Now if only republicans in congress were "SANE" we might just get something done for this country!

[ProSense]

3. It's a

plan only Republicans can oppose.

[Andy823]

4. Yep

Any plan that comes from the president they will "oppose"! What they don't seem to realize is that when the public sees the numbers, the majority of them agree with the president, and I think the more republicans play their stupid games, the more they avoid the "real" issues, and the more they attack the presidents plans to do what they, the republicans, say we need to do, lower the deficit, the more the republicans come off looking like spoiled little brats who only want to say NO, NO, NO, to anything that actually makes sense!

All they are doing is catering to the tea party clowns because they are afraid they will get a tea party challenger in their primaries next year, and that scares the crap out of them. What they fail to realize for some reason is that the tea party crowd is becoming more and more unpopular with the general public, and even the average republican voter is tired of the tea party running things in congress.

[young but wise]

5. K&R.

[bvar22]

6. K&R for a good step in the right direction.

I saw no mention of returning the Capital Gains Tax to pre-Bush levels.
Did I miss that,
or is that included in some other provision?

THAT break for The RICH is one of the most grievous insults to Americans who have to Work for their Money.


Still, this plan heads in the right direction.
To FIX things, we need to go back to a Pre-Reagan Tax Structure, among other things,
and I won't rest until the Working Class is restored to its rightful place in America.


I want MY Working Class America BACK!
:patriot:


You will know them by their WORKS.


Solidarity99!
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