2016-05-19wsj.com

``The specter of double taxation, which animates complaints about today's U.S. corporate tax code, is receding, according to a new study from the Tax Policy Center. Tax-exempt and tax-preferred entities--such as 401(k) plans and other retirement accounts--own more than 75% of U.S. corporate stock, nearly opposite the prevailing pattern from 50 years ago, the study said.

The study is emboldening Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R., Utah), who says he is within weeks of releasing a proposal that would largely end the remaining double taxation of corporate dividends by shifting the burden from highly mobile corporations to less mobile shareholders.

Sen. Hatch's plan would let companies deduct dividends, lowering their effective corporate tax rate as a backdoor way to reduce the U.S.'s world-high top statutory tax rate of 35%. Individual taxable shareholders' dividends would be taxed as ordinary income instead of at lower capital-gains rates. Those taxes would be directly withheld by companies when they pay dividends to investors.

...

From 2010 to 2014, public companies with positive domestic pretax book income paid 32.2% of that income as dividends and another 43.4% as share repurchases, according to Mr. Merrill. Under Mr. Hatch's plan, companies would have greater incentives to increase dividends and substitute payouts for buybacks.

Mr. Hatch would also lessen or eliminate the tax code's bias toward debt financing, because companies can deduct interest payments to bondholders but not dividends to shareholders. To keep the plan from increasing budget deficits, Mr. Hatch may include a tax on interest paid to foreigners and tax-exempt entities to make sure someone pays tax on that business income.

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Dealing with tax-deferred investors--such as owners of 401(k) plans--is trickier. Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) said he was concerned about who might pay more. "This proposal looks like it could go from double-taxing corporate income to double-taxing retirement plans," he said.

This looks mostly good, assuming they fix the deferred-tax retirement plans issue. And what's not mentioned in here is the impact on small businesspersons -- i.e. those running S-corps, who currently benefit from the lower dividend tax rates on dividends they pay themselves. So a change could conceivably kill some significant number of small businesses. Considering these "losers", it's certainly strange we don't see a lot of discussion of keeping deductions/lower tax rates under a certain individual income cap...



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