Marty Sullivan always writes interesting and provocative pieces on tax policy, so when we saw his recent piece in Forbes on tax reform Should Small Business Have Veto Power Over Corporate Tax Reform, we read it eagerly.
It’s provocative, alright, but we do have a couple observations.
Marty argues that pass through business advocates “ willfully omit the existence of the corporate double tax from their spin and howl ” regarding tax reform. Really?
We don’t howl, and we don’t ignore the existence of the double corporate tax. It’s a central part of our message on how to build a foundation for good tax reform. Our Pass-Through Tax Reform letter signed by more than 70 business organizations calls for reform that embraces three basic principles:
- Reform should be comprehensive;
- Reform should restore rate parity; and
- Reform should reduce the double tax on corporate income.
It’s hard to ”omit” the double tax when its reduction is one of your key principles.
There are lots of other examples, but the testimony one of our advisors presented before the House Ways & Means Committee back in 2012 stands out:
First, as much as possible, the business tax system in the United States should move toward a single tax structure, and away from the punitive double tax C corporation system. Especially for closely-held businesses, a single tax system substantially reduces complexity and eliminates the opportunity and incentive for non-productive tax planning and strategizing. Moreover, it has the benefits of simplicity and transparency.
Marty should remember that testimony. He was sitting right next to him.
Marty argues that our effective rate study says that “ corporations are getting away with murder.” Again, not true. The study’s focus is on the effective tax burden paid by pass through businesses. To our knowledge, this analysis has never been done before and it shows that S corporations and partnerships will pay very high effective tax rates in 2013:
- S Corps: 32 percent
- Partnerships: 29 percent
Large S corporations making more than $200,000 will pay even higher rates: 35 percent!
The study does calculate C corporation effective rates for comparison purposes, but makes clear there are many ways to calculate the C corporate rate and that foreign income and taxes are a complication that needs to be acknowledged. An alternative measure included in the study, looking only at domestic C corporation income, has the C corporation effective rate at 27 percent.
The study doesn’t omit the double tax either. The C corporation calculation includes dividends payments (but not capital gains taxes due to data limitations). The study finds that the dividend tax does not increase effective tax rates significantly:
Our results suggest that C corporation dividends raises their average effective tax rate by only 2 percentage points. The primary reason for this result is that C corporations do not pay significant amounts of dividends. IRS SOI data indicate that approximately 4.5 percent of C corporations paid cash dividends in 2009.
Finally, we have to say something about the title of the piece. We know writers don’t get to pick their headlines, so we’ll lay this bit of logical inconsistency at the feet of the Forbes editors.
The pass through business community is not asking to veto anything.B They are asking not to have their tax burden raised substantially on top of the tax hike they just shouldered starting 2013.B Budget neutral, corporate-only reform, as outlined by the Obama Administration, among others, would do just that. It would cut taxes for large corporations and raise them for pass through businesses.
If the point of reform is to encourage domestic job creation and investment, only reform that includes pass through businesses will get you there.B Ernst & Young reported that pass through businesses employ more people and contribute more to national income than their C corporation friends, so raising their taxes in order to cut taxes for C corporations is not going to help encourage hiring or investments.
Moreover, creating a tax code where similar business income is subjected to two very different rates – 28 percent for C corporations but nearly 45 percent for individuals and pass through businesses under the Obama plan – would encourage the gaming and income shifting prevalent in the tax shelter days before 1986. Again from Tom’s 2012 testimony:
When I first started practicing law in 1979, the top individual income tax rate was 70 percent, whereas the top income tax rate for corporations taxed at the entity level (C corporations) was only 46 percent. This rate differential obviously provided a tremendous incentive for successful business owners to have as much of their income as possible taxed, at least initially, at the C corporation tax rates, rather than at the individual tax rates, which were more than 50 percent higher…
This tax dynamic set up a cat and mouse game between Congress, the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (the “Service” ) on the one hand and taxpayers and their advisors on the other, whereby C corporation shareholders sought to pull money out of their corporations in transactions that would subject them to the more favorable capital gains rates that were prevalent during this period or to accumulate wealth inside the corporations. Congress reacted by enacting numerous provisions that were intended to force C corporation shareholders to pay the full double tax, efforts that were only partially successful.
Under corporate-only tax reform, we would be right back in the pre-1986 world Tom is describing. It is anti-tax reform, in every sense.
More on Business Tax Reform
The pass through community has a new ally. In an op-ed posted on CFO.com, Douglas Stransky, a partner at the law firm Sullivan & Worcester, pushed back on President Obama’s corporate-only tax reform proposal introduced earlier this year:
If you want to stimulate the economy through tax reform, however, you should also pay attention to the tax burden on the companies creating the most jobs. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, firms with less than 500 employees accounted for 67 percent of the new jobs since the recession ended. Those are companies led by entrepreneurs, who are building businesses around new products or services and expanding their payrolls.
Yet the discussion about corporate tax reform has only focused on large, multinational corporations, and not small businesses…The S Corp, partnership and sole proprietorship tax rate has not been the focus of corporate tax reform in Washington. But it should be. If the C Corp rate of 35 percent is reduced to 28 percent it will leave an inequity in the tax structure between large and small businesses. This is senseless, especially when it’s assumed that lower income tax rates would enable employers to have more money to reinvest in their companies and create more jobs.
…The average American thinks corporate tax reform will apply to any U.S. business. But what is being discussed will apply only to a small percentage. Small businesses are the engine of our economy. If we reform taxes for S Corps as well as C Corps, that engine will run more efficiently.
Amen, amen.