Grassley will decide next week on Senate Finance chairmanship. Iowa’s Chuck Grassley is in line to chair the tax-writing panel, if he wants it. Grassley, who has chaired the Finance panel in the past, currently heads the Senate Judiciary Committee. If Grassley decides to keep that post, Banking Committee Chair Mike Crapo of Idaho will take over Finance.
GILTI regs should appear soon. Treasury has sent proposed guidance on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s GILTI minimum tax provisions to the Office of Management & Budget for review. OMB has 10 days to look the rules over, so Treasury should release the draft guidance sometime this month. These would be the second of three sets of post-TCJA regs on taxation of multinational corporations.
Voters never did care about TCJA’s tax cuts. NBC News’ exit polling found that only 22 percent of voters listed the economy as their top priority. About 45 percent said the tax cuts had little impact on their personal finances. Opinions differed sharply along partisan lines, however. More than eight in 10 Republicans said the new tax laws helped them, while only 15 percent of Democrats thought so.
The federal deficit continues to grow. CBO estimates the government ran up a deficit of $98 billion in October, about $35 billion more than the shortfall recorded in the same month last year. The deficit continues to increase because of the 2017 tax cuts, which reduced revenue without offsets. There was also that bipartisan spending bill that Congress passed in the spring.
New Tax Cuts and Jobs Act papers in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. University of Michigan’s Joel Slemrod’s contribution, entitled “Is this tax reform, or just confusion?” is here. University of California at Berkeley’s Alan Auerbach’s contribution, entitled “Measuring the Effects of the Corporate Tax Cut,” is here.
Nevada joins nine other states in a “pink” sales tax carve-out. Voters decided this week to repeal the state’s sales and storage tax on tampons and sanitary pads. About 57 percent of Nevada voters approved the move so the state joins the District of Columbia and nine other states specifically exempting the items from sales tax. A Nevada fiscal note produced last year found that the state would lose $4.96 million to $7.11 million in revenue by ending the 6.86 percent sales tax on these products.
Five Ohio school districts reject a security tax. In southwestern Ohio, voters in five school districts said no to a ten-year, 1.5-mill property tax increase to fund school security and mental health counselors. Said one resident, “It is always something… [the five districts] already had [millions of dollars] in reserve and they want more and more.”
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