Missing the Mark: Evaluating the New Tax Preferences for Business Income

Ari Glogower and David Kamin

National Tax Journal, 2018, vol. 71, issue 4, 789-806

Abstract: The 2017 Tax Legislation introduced two significant new tax preferences for businesses: a reduction in the corporate rate to a flat 21 percent and the 20 percent deduction for pass-through income under Section 199A. Advocates of the legislation justified these preferences in part as a way to encourage new business investment and as a response to international tax competition. However, Congress failed to effectively achieve these goals by appropriately targeting these preferences on an economically coherent category of business income - such as the normal returns to new investment - and by protecting the domestic tax base as they addressed international pressures. Instead, the law extends its tax cuts to a variety of economic returns, including returns to labor of highly-compensated domestic service providers, but only if income is earned in certain forms and in certain sectors of the economy. As a result, the legislation generates substantial new inequity, tax planning opportunities, and administrative challenges for the IRS — none of which was necessary to increase investment and reduce international profit shifting.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.17310/ntj.2018.4.09 (text/html)
Access is restricted to subscribers and members of the National Tax Association.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ntj:journl:v:71:y:2018:i:4:p:789-806

Access Statistics for this article

National Tax Journal is currently edited by Stacy Dickert-Conlin and William M. Gentry

More articles in National Tax Journal from National Tax Association, National Tax Journal Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The University of Chicago Press ().