Ryan Ellis, Director Of Tax Policy, Americans For Tax Reform
Biography provided by participant
Ryan Ellis is Tax Policy Director at Americans for Tax Reform. Ellis also serves as Executive Director of americanshareholders.org. Prior to working at ATR, Ellis worked for Jack Kemp at Empower America. Ellis runs his own tax preparation firm in the Washington, DC area. Ellis is an IRS "Enrolled Agent," making him one of the nation's foremost experts on tax law. Ellis has written and spoken on tax policy issues in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Washington Times, Investors Business Daily, Tax Notes, ABC News, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business News, and Fox News.
The inconvenient truth of the last decade, as Bruce points out above, is that declining marginal tax rates at the top end of the scale have been coincident with a more progressive distribution of the tax burden. That does not mean that the opposite is true, but it does mean that raising tax rates is not exactly a surefire way to continue making the code more progressive. In all liklihood, raising the top tax rate to near or over 50% will result in pre-1986 style income sheltering. That will shift the tax burden down the scale to the broad middle… Read more
There are several problems that a reform commission deals with right off the bat.<br><br> politically, the staff of Ways and Means and Finance haven't been involved. That makes the exercise little more than a waste of time and money creating a new VAT would be a disaster. Very soon, there would be European levels of VAT rates (20 percent or so), with carve outs, etc. And since a tax-inclusive system is opaque, people wouldn't feel the pain of a tax increase depending who you ask, there's somewhere between one-third to four-tenths of families don't have an income tax liability. that… Read more
Here's a program of recommendations ATR put out earlier today: 1. Cut the top personal income tax rate from 35% to 25% 2. Cut the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 25% 3. Cut the capital gains and dividends rate from 15% to 0% 4. Move to full business expensing of all business investments 5. Stop double-taxing U.S. employers on their income earned overseas 6. Kill the Death Tax 7. Kill the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) 8. Cut the payroll and self-employment tax rate in half, from 15.3% to 7.5% 9. Cap government spending to the pre-Bush level of… Read more
This might be effective depending how it's structured. There are several ways to accomplish this, each with different growth prospects: 1. Rebate of payroll taxes. It's important to note that this is more than fully, fully, and/or partially accomplished for poor and near-poor households via the Earned Income Credit and the Additional Child Tax Credit. If your goal is to relieve poor and near-poor households with children of their FICA responsibilities, mission accomplished. Anything further would yield precisely nothing in new economic growth. 2. Exempt the first (say) $10,000 in wages and self-employment profits from FICA/SECA. This would effectively serve to… Read more
Absolutely not. The unionized auto sector has spent decades caving into the excessive salary, pension, and health benefit demands of the UAW. Just last year they signed a health care "VEBA" (i.e., union slush fund) which everyone knew was underfunded. Now they want taxpayers to bail out their weak negotiating positions? Please. Besides, there's more to the U.S. auto industry than Detroit. According to Yahoo Finance, total revenue at the Detroit Three totaled $454 billion for the latest reporting period. That sounds like a lot of money, except when you consider that Toyota and Honda had total revenue of $382… Read more
Let's see: Obama wants to raise the marginal tax rate on two-thirds of small business income and the lion's share of wages to a rate perhaps approaching 50 percent (when the higher individual income tax and Social Security taxable wage base is factored together). He wants to raise the tax rate on capital gains and dividends from 15 percent to 20 percent. He wants to "close corporate tax loopholes" and has no plan to reduce our corporate income tax rate, just barely the second highest in the OECD. So, no, I don't think Obama's plan to raise taxes on small… Read more
Biography provided by participant
