Two More Reasons to Hate Taxes

When all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. That old saying makes a lot of sense. As a tax economist, I'm sometimes guilty of looking at all sorts of issues based on their relationship with the tax code. In my defense, however, the tentacles of the IRS now reach into almost every nook and cranny of our society. And greedy tax collectors on the state and local level make a bad situation even worse. Two things from today's inbox illustrate my point.

First, you may remember that the IRS is going to be a chief enforcer of Obamacare. Well, our friends at the tax collection agency have just released a draft form for the "credit for small employer health insurance premiums." We already have a tax system that takes up 72,000 pages and requires more than 1,000 different forms and publications, but now we can add 25 more lines of mind-numbing, eye-glazing bureaucratese, all of which doubtlessly will lead to innocent mistakes that cause many more taxpayers to have nightmarish interactions with the IRS. (click here to see a full-size version of the form)


Second, Hiwa Alaghebandian at the American Enterprise Institute has an article on telecommuting which largely focuses on the environmental and quality-of-live advantages of people working from home. What does this have to do with taxes, you ask? It turns out that greedy state politicians have an annoying tendency of trying to tax people who live elsewhere. This form of taxation without representation imposes both bureaucratic and economic barriers that hinder an otherwise desirable development.

Possibly the biggest barrier to telework are state tax laws. Many states implement some form of double taxation on out-of-state teleworkers. For example, New York applies a “convenience of the employer” doctrine on out-of-state teleworkers who work for a New York–based organization, which requires them to pay income tax to New York for telework days outside of the state. All work done outside of New York is subject to New York income tax, unless the work is done outside of New York out of necessity to the employer . In 2005, the New York State Court of Appeals upheld the “convenience of the employer” doctrine in Huckaby vs. New York State Division of Tax Appeals. Thomas Huckaby, a Tennessee resident, worked for a New York–based company, but teleworked 75 percent of the time. On his New York State nonresident tax returns, Huckaby allocated 25 percent of his income to New York, and 75 percent to Tennessee; however, the New York State tax department determined that Huckaby should have paid New York income tax on 100 percent of his income. The court sided with the New York State tax department, stating that the doctrine was constitutionally applied. As many as 35 states have some form of double taxation for teleworkers.

New Video Exposes Nightmare of IRS Complexity

My all-time favorite former intern, Hiwa Alaghebandian, has just narrated a new Economics 101 video about the cost of the tax code for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. I won't spoil the surprise by giving the details, but you if you're not angy now, you will be after watching.

Sex-Change Operations Are Deductible According to Tax Court

The internal revenue code is a monstrous nightmare of special-interest loopholes and class-warfare penalties, but at least is generates some interesting stories. Here's a report from Bloomgberg about a court deciding that the costs of switching from a man to a woman are tax deductible. Since I'm not a leftist, I'm not going to make the absurd argument that taxpayers are subsidizing sex-change operations. After all, the case revolved around how much of his/her own money the taxpayer got to keep. But I am an economist, so I'm going to say that tax loopholes tilt the playing field and encourage all sorts of inefficient outcomes. Indeed, this tax court ruling should be seen as a symbol of why tax preferences for health care should be eliminated as part of the shift to a simple, fair, and neutral flat tax:

Costs incurred in sex-change operations and procedures are tax-deductible, the U.S. Tax Court ruled. The Washington-based court decided yesterday that hormone therapies and sex reassignment surgeries are necessary to treat gender identity disorder, a disease, in the case of a Boston- area man who became a woman named Rhiannon O’Donnabhain. “The Court is persuaded that petitioner’s sex reassignment surgery was medically necessary,” Judge Joseph Gale wrote in a 69-page decision for the majority. The decision is the first to rule that sex-change operations qualify as medical care and overturns a 2005 Internal Revenue Service policy denying medical expense deductions in such operations on the grounds they are ‘cosmetic.’’ The case involves a $5,679 tax bill assessed by the IRS, which denied medical deductions claimed by O’Donnabhain after she underwent sex reassignment-surgery in 2000. O’Donnabhain, a civil engineer who joined the U.S. Coast Guard during the Vietnam War, was diagnosed with gender identity disorder in 1997. O’Donnabhain sued the IRS after it denied her deduction of $25,000 in out-of-pocket medical costs associated with the surgeries and other care such as hormone treatments and counseling, according to Boston-based Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, which represented her in court.

Political Alchemy, Part I: Turning Spending Increases into Tax Cuts

Politicians in Washington have come up with something far more impressive than turning lead into gold or water into wine. Using self-serving budget rules, they can increase the burden of government spending and say they are cutting taxes instead.

This bit of legerdemain is made possible, thanks to the convolutions of the personal income tax, by adopting or expanding refundable tax credits. But in this case, "refundable" does not mean the government is returning money to taxpayers. Instead, it means that money is being redistributed to people who do not earn enough to be subject to the income tax.

This is hardly a trivial issue. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the amount of income redistribution being laundered through the tax code is now so large that the bottom 40 percent of the population has a negative "effective" income tax rate. In simple terms (though perhaps with profound political implications), the income tax is a revenue generator for a big share of the population.

And the problem is going to get worse if the President's budget is approved. Buried in the fine print, on pages 188-189 of the Analytical Perspective of the Budget, you will see that the President is proposing to increase this hidden form of spending by more than $152 billion over the next ten years.

It is worth noting that proponents argue that it is okay to classify this new spending as tax cuts because it somehow offsets other tax payments, especially the payroll tax. I'm sympathetic to lower taxes on everybody, including the poor, but surely it is better to be honest and simply cut the taxes that people pay. The current methodology, by contrast, is open to abuse. Heck, I'm surprised politicians don't classify other forms of spending as tax cuts. Maybe corporate welfare can be reclassified as a corporate tax cut (I better stop lest I give the political class any ideas).

Defenders also assert that some so-called refundable tax credits, particularly the earned income tax credit, are designed to encourage work. That is partly true, but credits like the EITC are withdrawn as income climbs, and this means poor people face punitive marginal tax rates, so the overall effect on hours worked may be negligible.

The right approach, of course, is to get the federal government out of the racket of redistributing income.