Taxes

The White House just issued a statement declaring President Obama’s intention to veto H.R. 3630. It’s short and to the point and posted in full below; if you want more details about the flaws in the bill, you can read our posts about it.

STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY

H.R. 3630 – Middle Class Tax Cut Act of 2011 (Rep. Camp, R-Michigan, and 5 others)

The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 3630. With only days left before taxes go up for 160 million hardworking Americans, H.R. 3630 plays politics at the expense of middle-class families. H.R. 3630 breaks the bipartisan agreement on spending cuts that was reached just a few months ago and would inevitably lead to pressure to cut investments in areas like education and clean energy. Furthermore, H.R. 3630 seeks to put the burden of paying for the bill on working families, while giving a free pass to the wealthiest and to big corporations by protecting their loopholes and subsidies.

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With continued high unemployment causing increased numbers of women to lose health insurance coverage, policy makers should be trying to help people afford insurance.  They should ensure that someone doesn’t have to stop medical treatment because she lost her job.  They shouldn’t make it more difficult to access health coverage – but that is just what H.R. 3630 (introduced by Rep. Dave Camp, R-MI), a bill up for a vote in the House today, does. 

Reduce Financial Protections for Low- and Moderate-Income Americans who Receive Tax Credits under the Affordable Care Act

In 2014, the Affordable Care Act will provide tax credits to help individuals and families purchase coverage through a health insurance exchange.  Advance payments of the tax credits to help pay for insurance premiums (“premium tax credits”) will be paid directly to the insurance company based on information on household size and income provided to the insurance exchange.  Credits will be available on a sliding scale to help people with household income under 400 percent of the federal poverty level (about $88,000 for a family of four in 2011).

Actual income will often be different than income projected when a family enrolls in coverage.  People get married or divorced.  People lose jobs or get new jobs.  Some people work fewer hours than they expected.  Other people get promotions or bonuses.  Sometimes an unexpected cost arises – perhaps a large medical bill – that requires a person to take a second job.  Read more »

The “Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act” (H.R. 3630), introduced by House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dave Camp (R. Mich.), contains a very Scrooge-like pay-for to extend unemployment insurance benefits, payroll tax cuts, and doctors’ Medicare reimbursements: taking tax benefits away from low-income working families. H.R. 3630 would impose a new requirement for tax filers claiming the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit. As suggested by its name, this credit is intended to help families meet the costs of raising children. The credit is refundable for low-income families with at least $3,000 in earnings.

Specifically, H.R. 3630 would prevent tax filers from claiming the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit without a Social Security Number. This means that the brunt of the cuts to this important tax benefit would fall upon immigrant families. Read more »

For weeks now, we have been asking Congress to pass a bill to fully extend federal unemployment insurance (UI) benefits before they expire at the end of the year. Instead, last Friday, Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) introduced a bill (H.R. 3630) that would drastically reduce the number of weeks of federal UI available and would hit hardest in states with the highest unemployment (Michigan, ironically, being one of them). The bill also includes several other troubling proposals, including some changes to the overall structure of the UI program – but more on those in other posts.

The unemployment rate is currently at 8.6 percent, long-term unemployment is at record levels, and the jobs outlook is very grim (remember when some Senators voted to block several jobs bills rather than raise taxes on millionaires by even one cent?). It is shocking, then, that Rep. Camp not only proposes to cut critical federal UI benefits at all, but proposes to cut them by more than half: Read more »

If you’ve been following our coverage of how the continuing unemployment crisis is affecting women and their families, you’re probably well aware of the critical need to maintain federal unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. But even if you’ve never read this blog before today, you probably know that unemployment has been far too high for far too long. And I’m guessing someone you know well – a friend, a sibling, an aunt, a neighbor, or maybe you – has lost a job in recent years and depended on state and/or federal UI benefits to stay afloat.  

So it might have sounded like good news when Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), Chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, introduced the “Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act” (H.R. 3630) and promised to “get[] Americans back to work through commonsense reforms” to UI and other programs. But don’t be fooled by the title – among many other misguided and downright awful provisions, the bill would severely undermine the effectiveness of UI by cutting federal benefits in the states hardest hit by the recession and attacking the very nature of the UI program as social insurance. 

Specifically, H.R. 3630 would dismantle the longstanding structure of the federal-state UI program by:

• Imposing unnecessary restrictions on UI eligibility and increasing state administrative costs. State laws already require UI recipients to actively seek new employment. But H.R. 3630 would require them to develop and implement costly new systems to closely track job seeking activities, imposing an unfunded and unnecessary administrative burden on state agencies. This new requirement appears to stem directly from the oft-repeated but ill-informed notion that jobless workers are lazy and don’t want to work. This noxious stereotype also seems to motivate the bill’s inclusion of another offensive (and costly) provision encouraging states to require UI applicants to submit to drug tests before they can receive benefits.

In an annual reminder to taxpayers, the Internal Revenue Service has announced that tax refund checks for more than 99,000 taxpayers can’t be delivered because of mailing address errors. The checks average $1,547 this year.

If you haven’t received the refund you were expecting, check out the “Where’s My Refund?” tool on www.IRS.gov to find out the status of your refund and, in some cases, instructions on how to resolve delivery problems. You can access a telephone version of “Where’s My Refund?” by calling 1-800-829-1954.

To avoid problems with refunds in the future, the IRS recommends that you electronically file your tax return and elect to receive your refund through direct deposit to your bank account.  Read more »

A new report by the Institute for Policy Studies reveals that of last year’s 100 highest-paid corporate CEOs, 25 took home more than their company paid in 2010 federal income taxes. The report found that these corporate chief executives – CEOs of International Paper Company, Prudential, General Electric, Verizon, Boeing, and eBay, among others -- averaged $16.7 million in pay. At the same time, a combination of tax shelters and loopholes allowed those companies to avoid an average of more than $400 million each in federal taxes.    Read more »