The Finance 202: GOP drive to repeal estate tax risks making its tax plan more unpopular

The following article by Tory Newmyer was posted on the Washington Post website December 8, 2017:

If you didn’t know better, you might think some Republicans were trying to see how low they can drive public support for their tax plan. 

It’s already basement-dwelling, with lopsided majorities of voters consistently telling pollsters the GOP’s rewrite of the code will benefit the wealthy more than the middle class. On Thursday, 54 House Republicans banded together behind a push seemingly tailor-made to reinforce the suspicion. 

Their request, laid out in a letter to their leadership: to insist in conference negotiations on maintaining the House tax bill’s full repeal of the estate tax, rather than the Senate version, which doubles the current exemption to $22 million for couples.

“I get all the political arguments over, ‘Hey it’s an easier political deal to do it this way,’ particularly given the perceptions with the president,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), who organized the letter, tells me, referring to estimates that full repeal would save President Trump’s heirs $1.1 billion. “But the reality is, this is just a fundamental issue about, to me, a tax that seems immoral… It’s been a long-term Republican platform position. To me, it’s important to do the things we said we were going to do.”

The letter came hours after the release of a national poll showing, again, the tax push remains deeply unpopular with voters. Sixty-nine percent of respondents to the CBS News survey said the proposal would benefit wealthy Americans; less than a quarter said it would help their own family.

And it also comes on the heels of a new report showing the wealthiest 1 percent of American households own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, a higher share than at any point since at least 1962. That wealth gap is widening, with the share of the wealth owned by the top 1 percent climbing nearly three percentage points since 2013.

Some conservatives registered objections to full repeal of the estate tax, including Josh Holmes, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell (R-Ky.):

And blogger and radio host Erick Erickson:

Republican negotiators aim to hash out differences between the two chambers’ bills in time to get a package to the president before Christmas. Since both versions exhausted the $1.5 billion in deficit spending their budget blueprints allowed, deciding what ends up in the final product requires making decisions between competing demands.

The Republicans who signed Davidson’s letter aren’t the only ones who believe the estate tax repeal deserves priority. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) said the tax is “just wrong” and committed to fighting for full repeal in conference, per the Washington Examiner’s Joseph Lawler. (There are Senate Republican negotiators on both sides. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman points to scarce revenue in arguing for the Senate version, which is $68 billion cheaper, while South Dakota Sen. John Thune embraces the lower chamber’s position.)

The estate tax repeal advocates are arguing for a shrinking, and extremely wealthy, slice of the population. As The Post’s Glenn Kessler points out, since successive Congresses started chipping away at the levy four decades ago, the number of estates it captures has dwindled from 139,000 in 1977 to 52,000 in 2000 to just 5,500 this year. About half those subject to it would pay an average tax of roughly 9 percent. And while Trump’s campaign plan called for repealing the tax, as Glenn points out, the House-passed bill goes further by also protecting inherited assets from capital gains taxes they would otherwise face.

“It seems to me it ought to be a remarkably low priority for tax reduction,” says Michael Graetz, a law professor at Columbia University and former Treasury Department official under George H.W. Bush whose 2006 book “Death by a Thousand Cuts” chronicled the history of estate tax lobbying.

Proponents of full repeal, he said, “hide behind farmers and small businesses, but estate tax revenues virtually all come from portfolio wealth. Once you’re up to a $22 million exemption, the only people paying the estate tax are the hundred-millionaires and billionaires.”

Indeed, the Mars family — owners of the candy empire and worth an estimated $78 billion, making them the third-richest clan in the country — is still actively lobbying on the issue, lobbying records show. “As a family-held business, we are supportive of meaningful corporate tax reforms and estate tax reforms, which allow us to grow, re-invest in our company and continue to create jobs in the United States,” Denise Young, Mars Incorporated’s global director of external communications, said in a statement.

Jamie Richardson, vice president of the burger chain White Castle — likewise a family-owned business since its 1921 founding — said repealing the tax would strengthen a business model that, unlike public companies, doesn’t manage with an eye toward Wall Street and short-term returns. The company is aiming for $700 million in revenue this year, “but that gets reinvested back in the business and the margins are small,” he said.

“Of course there are going to be tough decisions,” Richardson said of the tax debate’s endgame. “It’s about achieving lower rates and making sure the benefits are real for every American citizen. We really believe this is something that’s going to free up a lot of opportunity for a lot of family businesses to grow and prosper.” He plans on traveling from Columbus, Ohio to Washington next week to make the case to lawmakers in person.

Meanwhile, Davidson, whose 8th district runs up the western border of the state and stretches east toward Columbus, said “it’s important that we do the things we’ve told the American people we’re going to do.”

Davidson added he wouldn’t put estate tax repeal at the top of his list of last-minute edits to the tax package. More importantly, he said, the final product should repeal the alternative minimum tax and make individual rate cuts permanent. 

View the post here.