Last week, the Congressional Progressive Caucus released its budget proposal, the Better Off Budget, which eliminates the automatic spending cuts (the “sequestration” that has slashed public investments and harmed the economy) while also increasing employment by 8.8 million jobs and cutting the deficit by $4 trillion over a decade.
The Better Off Budget is able to accomplish all of this partly because it is willing to do the one thing that Congressional majorities have refused to do: raise revenue. Estimates for the revenue provisions in the Better Off Budget were provided by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Economic Policy Institute.
The budget proposes returning to the tax rules that applied at the end of the Clinton years for Americans with incomes exceeding $250,000 and taxing investment income at the same rates as income from work. The budget also incorporates a proposal from Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky to provide additional income tax brackets (with rates of 45 percent and higher) for those with incomes exceeding $1 million.
A tax credit similar to the Making Work Pay Credit (which was provided temporarily under the recovery act enacted in 2009) would be available in 2015 and 2016, and in a scaled back form in 2017. Citizens for Tax Justice has explained that the Making Work Pay Credit was more targeted towards families struggling to get by, and therefore more effective in stimulating the economy, than other tax breaks.
The Better Off Budget also makes some important changes to the corporate income tax, including doing away with the rule allowing American corporations to “defer” paying U.S. taxes on profits that are officially “offshore.” CTJ has long argued that deferral encourages corporations to use accounting tricks to make their U.S. profits appear to be earned in countries where they won’t be taxed (offshore tax havens). While the administration and members of Congress have proposed complicated rules to crack down on this type of tax avoidance, the most straightforward and effective solution is to stop rewarding these games by ending deferral.
Because the Congressional Progressive Caucus is willing to take on the corporate interests and others that the rest of Congress tiptoes around, it is able to put forward a plan that actually provides more deficit reduction with less pain for working Americans. The Better Off Budget would reduce the deficit to 1.4 percent of gross domestic product (1.4 percent of economic output) within a decade, as illustrated by the chart from the Caucus below. The President’s budget would leave a larger deficit, 1.6 percent of GDP, while under the current law the deficit would be 4 percent of GDP.
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