Taxes should be fair, which to me means they should be based on ability to pay. For that reason, my favorite Michigan tax is the personal income tax. It is a flat percentage of adjusted gross income (AGI) with personal exemptions to protect low-income people. Some people want to make the rate progressive, like the federal income tax. I want to keep it flat. But I would make some major changes. Exemptions. For tax year 2009, the exemptions are $3600 for each exemption claimed on your federal tax return PLUS
If the purpose of exemptions really is to protect the low-income people, the total of the exemptions for a household should be about the same as the poverty level for a similar household. Here are the 2009 federal Health and Human Services Department poverty guidelines:
Now let's compare exemption totals with poverty guidelines for an assortment of households:
As you can see, the income protected by our current exemptions is much less than the poverty guidelines. I would revise the exemptions so that family exemption totals match the poverty guidelines. I would also get rid of the special exemptions for seniors, the disabled and persons receiving UCBs. Subtractions. The personal income tax doesn't tax all income. It starts with the adjusted gross income (AGI) from your federal tax return, but then there are "additions" and "subtractions" that are reported on MI-1040 Schedule 1. There are 13 subtractions (the numbers are the line numbers from Schedule 1):
Detailed explanations of each of the subtractions are in the instructions for Schedule 1. I have no problem with some of these subtractions. Number 11, Income attributable to another state, makes sense if that income is already being taxed by the other state. And 15-19 and some of 20 are exemptions designed for specific public purposes. I might also be OK with #10 if I understood it. But the others are just ordinary types of income that the Feds consider taxable. There is no reason to believe that people receiving these types of income would suffer hardship if taxed. Take me, for example. My wife and I are retired and our only income is from Social Security, pensions and interest. These are our figures for the 2009 tax year:
Our federal tax for 2009 was $3598. Our state tax was zero. Actually, we got a $950 “refund”, which was our homestead property tax credit. Although our gross income was $62,856, the state paid us. Had our pensions and Social Security been taxable to the extent they are for the federal tax, we would have paid $911:
There is no reason for pensions to be exempt. They are a form of wages - a delayed payment of wages. Part of the pension comes from contributions made to the pension fund by the employee, and if those contributions were made from after-tax wages, that part should not be taxed again. The “taxable amount” is the part that has never been taxed. In November 2007, I sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Treasury asking for a breakdown by item of total "subtractions from income" and they said they don't have it. The net amount of additions and subtractions are expected to reduce income tax revenues by over $4.6 billion in 2010 (Executive Budget Appendix on Tax Credits, Deductions, and Exemptions, page 63), and although we report them item by item on our Schedule 1, Treasury doesn't have totals by item. I followed up with a letter to State Treasurer Robert Kleine saying that the information would be very helpful to policy makers. I urged him to make the system changes necessary to collect the information. Jeff Guilfoyle of Treasury's Office of Revenue and Tax Analysis responded on behalf of Mr. Kleine saying that Treasury has decided to capture the data on 2007 returns, and the data should be available in about a year. In the meantime, I was able to get some "Individual Income and Tax Data" for Michigan for 2007 from the IRS. These amounts were all reported in adjusted gross income (AGI). Amounts are in thousands of dollars:
All of the above are subtracted from income for state income tax purposes. The AGI for all Michigan taxpayers in 2007 was $246.805 billion, so the above total is over 13% of AGI. Had that amount been taxed at 4.35%, the rate for 2007, it would have generated $1.4 billion in revenue. The following types of income were also listed on the IRS report. For the state income tax, they are subtracted only for taxpayers over age 65 and the subtracted amount is limited to a maximum of $9,690 on a single return or $19,380 on a joint return. Also, the maximum must be reduced by the amount subtracted for retirement pensions. A lot of people who receive these types of income are over 65. We can assume that a substantial portion of this $27+ billion was subtracted from income subject to the state income tax (amounts are in thousands of dollars):
Property Tax Credit. For seniors and the disabled, the homestead property tax credit is the amount by which property taxes exceed 3.5% of household income. If you are under 65, you only get 60% of that amount. No one with household income over $82,650 gets the credit. Our property tax credit for 2009 was $950. If I wasn't over 65, it would have been $570. In 2007, homestead property tax credits received by seniors totaled $321,556,300. (Source: Executive Budget Appendix on Tax Credits, Deductions, and Exemptions, page 65) Had that group not been over 65, the credit would have been 60% of that amount, or $184,980,120. The difference - the senior bonus - is $128,622,520. Stop favoring seniors. Seniors get a lot of tax breaks. Here are the known revenue losses (amounts are in thousands of dollars):
An analyst with the House Fiscal Agency tells me that each 0.1% of the personal income tax represents $166 million in revenue, so eliminating just those breaks for seniors for which the revenue losses are known would allow the rate to be reduced by nearly 8 tenths of a percent, from 4.35% to 3.55%. As yet unknown are the losses from not taxing dividends, interest and net capital gains received by taxpayers over age 65. We do know from the IRS report that the total reported by Michigan taxpayers of all ages in 2007 was over $27 billion. There is no reason for seniors to get a break on their state income tax. They are no worse off financially than other age groups. Of all the 2007 federal income tax returns from Michigan residents that reported Social Security benefits, 52% had AGI over $50,000 (source: IRS report), and when income includes Social Security and/or pensions, the gross is likely to be more than AGI. Seniors are also more likely to have medical insurance, either with their pensions or with Medicare. Anyway, an income tax by definition considers ability to pay: seniors with low incomes would pay little or no tax, just like anyone else with low incomes. When one group does not pay its share, the burden is greater for other taxpayers. Ending tax breaks for seniors would allow the income tax rate to be decreased for all of us. The Michigan Income Tax was enacted in 1967. Here is a history of changes to the tax that affected seniors. Income tax breaks for seniors are not unique to Michigan. This report on the website of the National Conference of State Legislators talks about how all 50 states tax pensions and social security. Most states to some extent exempt pensions and social security from their income taxes, but some don't. California taxes pensions, but doesn't tax social security. Minnesota, Nebraska, Rhode Island and Vermont tax pensions and tax social security to the same extent the federal government does. One more thing about the "subtractions from income". The following table, which I put together from data taken from the IRS' historic tax statistics for Michigan, shows the percentage of AGI for the years 2004 and 2006 for each type of income. Note that the percentage is going down for salaries and wages and going up for the types of income that are in part or entirely subtracted from AGI for state tax purposes.
Here is another look, this time combining the amounts for the types of income that are fully taxable (by the state) and those that are exempt or partially exempt. Note that fully taxable income as a percentage of AGI is going down nearly 2% a year while income that is not fully taxable is going up by about the same amount. The state's tax base is eroding.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||