Taxes

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 »