As the House and Senate continue to try to reconcile their two versions of a tax plan, the taxing structure for pass-through entities (s-corps, LLC’s, etc.) continues to be somewhat controversial, if not completely nonsensical. As we pointed out last week, the Senate bill somewhat randomly chose to exclude pass-through entities organized as family trusts from tax cuts which would ultimately leave them on the hook for much larger tax bills due to the elimination of other deductions. It’s unclear whether this bizarre exclusion was just an oversight or an intentional political hit on an easy target that no one in Washington DC would dare defend publicly: rich families organized as trusts.
Now, a new note from the Tax Policy Center lays out some scenarios whereby the marginal tax rate for high-income pass-through entities could soar to over 100%. Of course, while two rational people can debate the impact of a ~40% tax rate on a person’s desire to work, we’re almost certain that a taxing structure that takes more than 100% of your marginal income will be a slight disincentive. Here’s an example of how it works from the Wall Street Journal:
Consider, for example, a married, self-employed New Jersey lawyer with three children and earnings of about $615,000. Getting $100 more in business income would force the lawyer to pay $105.45 in federal and state taxes, according to calculations by the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation. That is more than double the marginal tax rate that household faces today.
If the New Jersey lawyer’s stay-at-home spouse wanted a job, the first $100 of the spouse’s wages would require $107.79 in taxes. And the tax rates for similarly situated residents of California and New York City would be even higher, the Tax Foundation found. Analyses by the Tax Policy Center, which is run by a former Obama administration official, find similar results, with federal marginal rates as high as 85%, and those don’t include items such as state taxes, self-employment taxes or the phase-out of child tax credits.
As Joseph Rosenberg of the Tax Policy Center notes, the penalty is greatest for high-income pass-through entities in highly taxed states.
Consider the example of a married couple whose entire income is “specified service” income generated by a pass-through entity and who claims the standard deduction. At an income of $524,000, the couple could take an $87,000 deduction (17.4% of the couple’s taxable income “without regard” to the deduction) that would reduce their taxes by $30,450 (since they are in the 35% tax bracket), but the deduction is entirely phased out at an income of $624,000. On average, that amounts to more than a 30% surtax on top of the 35% statutory tax rate over that range of income.
The actual phase-out is much more complicated, as the bill’s text released Monday night makes clear, because the deduction continues to apply even as its benefit is phased out. (If that sounds convoluted, it’s because it is.) The couple’s marginal income tax rate would jump to 61.375% at $528,541 of income. And it would rise to 73% until their income reaches $624,000 and the deduction is fully phased-out, at which point their marginal tax rate would return to the 35 percent ordinary income tax rate. (Note that these calculations do not include the additional 3.8 percent in self-employment payroll tax or the net investment income tax).
Here is how the overall tax rate schedule for pass-through income would look:
“This is a big concern,” said Scott Greenberg, a Tax Foundation analyst. “It would be unfortunate if Congress passed a tax bill that had the effect of making additional work and additional income not worthwhile for any subgroup of households.”
Of course, in the end, this type of taxing structure just raises the returns on “gaming” the tax system in every way possible. “I would expect a huge tax-gaming response once people fully understand how it works,” said Mr. Gamage, a former Treasury Department official, who said business owners have an easier time engaging in such tax avoidance than salaried employees do. “The payoff for gaming is huge, within the set of people who both face these rates and have flexible enough business structures.”
Not surprisingly, lawmakers are looking at changes to prevent this debacle from happening as they attempt to reconcile Senate and House versions of the tax bill this week. The formal House-Senate conference committee will meet on Wednesday, and GOP lawmakers have said they may unveil an agreement by week’s end…though they seem to consistently miss their own self-imposed deadlines.
But you shouldn’t worry about these issues too much as a spokeswoman for the Senate Finance Committee assured the Journal that as “with any major reform, there will always be unusual hypotheticals delivering anomalous results…The goal of Congress’s tax overhaul has been to lower taxes on the American people and by and large, according to a variety of analyses, we’re achieving that.”
via http://ift.tt/2jxsQMb Tyler Durden