Christine Walizer, Author at The S Corporation Association

Senate to Consider Surtax

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) reportedly plans to bring up the President’s Jobs Bill this month and pay for it with a new 5 percent “surtax” on taxpayers making more than a million dollars. According to Politico:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is eyeing a tax on the nation’s highest earners as a way to defray some of the $447 billion price tag for the White House-written jobs package-a move that would shift attention away from its underlying policies and more towards party politics. Sources on and off Capitol Hill said Reid wants to swap out the bill’s current …

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admin2019-02-01T20:24:44+00:00October 5, 2011|

Corporate-Only Reform Takes One on the Chin

Tom Barthold of the Joint Committee on Taxation made the case to the Super Committee last week against attempting to reform the corporate side only.

It would be very difficult to wall off a number of provisions and say we’ll have one set of rules if you’re this type of entity and a potentially different set of rules if you’re another type of entity.

Later, in an exchange with Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), Barthold went into more detail:

SEN. PORTMAN: If you lowered the corporate rate and did so by getting rid of the some of the existing preferences, and those preferences also …

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admin2019-02-01T20:24:45+00:00September 27, 2011|

Battle Lines on Tax Policy

The President rolled out his latest deficit reduction outline yesterday. As expected, it included several tax recommendations. In sum, the President is calling for an additional $1.5 trillion in tax collections over the next decade, including:

Expire Bush Tax Cuts on High Income Earners ($800 billion)
Cap Itemized Deductions & Exemptions at 28 percent ($400 billion)
Various Loophole Closers ($300 billion)

There are a number of challenges with the list. First, allowing tax provisions already set to expire to, well, expire, doesn’t raise any revenue. It’s already in current law. That $800 billion in savings doesn’t exist.

Second, the President already proposed to use the …

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admin2019-02-01T20:24:45+00:00September 20, 2011|

Pass-Thru Employment Takes Center Stage

Robert Carroll’s study on pass-thru businesses continues to be a centerpiece in the tax policy discussion here in DC.

At yesterday’s Finance Committee hearing on the future of tax rates, Bill Rys from the National Federation of Independent Business did a great job of articulating just how many people work for pass-through businesses and why raising tax rates will hurt their ability to invest and create jobs. As Bill pointed out in his testimony:

Based on 2008 tax data, pass through businesses represented 95 percent of all business entities. These businesses employed a majority – 54 percent - of the total private …

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admin2019-02-01T20:24:45+00:00September 15, 2011|

Super Committee, Tax Reform, and Tax Provisions

Congress returned this week with most people focused on the Super Committee and its prospects for producing a deficit reduction plan by the end of the year.

To recap, the Budget Control Act created a Super Committee of twelve members charged with coming up with at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction by the end of the year. How they devise these savings is up to them, but if they fail, we will see $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts equally divided between defense and domestic spending starting in 2013 and spread out over nine years.

For tax wonks, the big question …

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admin2019-02-01T20:24:45+00:00September 7, 2011|