Tag Archives: Conformity

Look what they did here! This Senate Finance Committee slide from November shows only “conformity windfall” revenue from individual provisions, but then deducts individual and corporate tax relief against those totals to shrink the size of the Taxpayer Relief Fund, source of future tax reform. That’s not what the General Assembly ordered. How much corporate “conformity windfall” is missing from the top line of this chart?

By Steve Haner

Sometimes you have to start the victory lap, even if you only get halfway around the track. A year ago, on Bacon’s Rebellion and in Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy organs, I was beating the drum for a proposal to double the state’s standard deduction, the amount of family income exempt from income tax.

When the smoke cleared, the legislature had made a start, increasing the standard deduction for a married couple from the ridiculously greedy (on the Tax Man’s part) $6,000 to a slightly less ludicrous $9,000. This at a time when the federal standard deduction was going to $24,000, meaning the state taxes Virginia middle-income families more far heavily than Uncle Sam.  Continue reading →

What will you do with your $110?  Thanks to the conformity revenue flood, it’s coming.

Checks are expected to arrive in October for most Virginia taxpayers, the most important piece of campaign mail they’ll get before November’s election.  The $110 extra refund, $220 for a married couple, is the General Assembly’s response to the huge influx of new state tax revenue created by conforming state rules to recent federal changes.  Continue reading →

Only $1.7 of $4.6 billion was diverted back to taxpayers by 2019 law.  Final row includes $420 million for one-time tax rebates paid later this year.  It was the addition of the Pease Limitation raising taxes on high incomes which reduced the final tax relief total. Sources: Chainbridge Solutions August 2018 report on revenue projections. Department of Taxation on tax reduction estimates. Click to open.

The 2019 General Assembly is a dust storm in the rear-view mirror, but the four state tax increases that were discussed in “Taxaginia” last November are still in the road ahead.   This post revises and extends my reporting on their status in this morning’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, featured on the Commentary section front.

 In a piece in June 2018  I saw signs the state would keep the state income tax revenue harvest produced by conformity with the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.  Turns out that prediction was 60 percent correct, with my calculations showing less than 40 percent of the expected revenue was diverted by tax policy changes.   Continue reading →

The possibility of additional future state tax reform or tax cuts improved Monday under a new version of the pending bill that puts Virginia into conformity with the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.  The resulting tax revenue not returned by the modest policy changes in this bill are to be held in reserve for future action.

The language in the bill now better matches the earlier rhetoric about preventing a huge inflow of new income tax revenue.

The legal reality is no General Assembly can bind a future one, so the 2020 session could disband this new fund and just spend the money.  But it is a stronger statement of policy and intent, and perhaps will add focus to the debate over tax policy which is inevitable in the 2019 legislative elections.  Continue reading →

The compromise income tax bill hailed for preventing a tax policy train wreck in Virginia includes one new provision not included in earlier bills, not mentioned in any of the Republican press releases and not yet included in any fiscal impact statements.  Democrats wanted it.

It is yet another departure from the new federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.  The bill maintains a formula to reduce or cap itemized deductions known as the Pease limit.  TCJA removed the Pease limit at the federal level but the substitute tax bill voted on in committee Friday restores it at the state level.   Continue reading →

Neither the House nor Senate Republican tax plan returns more than half of the TCJA windfall.  The House GOP does propose to set aside another $517 million in the first year for some form of added tax relief, to be determined later this year.

The tax relief proposals advancing in both the Virginia House of Delegates and Virginia Senate return at most half of the estimated additional state revenue created by the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) over six years.

As Virginia leaders have debated what to do about the situation, all have been working off an estimate of the additional revenue provided by an outside economic consultant last year.  It projected $1.2 billion in the first two years and more than $4.5 billion in the first six years as the addition revenue Virginia would collect from conforming to the TCJA, absent changes in Virginia tax policy.  Continue reading →

The Best Friends of the Taxpayer Face Off

The numbers to remember as the Virginia House of Delegates and State Senate start voting on income tax conformity bills, perhaps beginning tomorrow, have nothing to do with the hundreds of millions of dollars on the table or the millions of taxpayers waiting to file returns.

The key numbers are 32 and 80.

With an emergency clause on one of the two House bills, scheduled for debate Thursday, and on the only Senate bill that came out of committee today, a full 80 percent of the members of either chamber need to vote yes or they fail.   Continue reading →

Virginia’s most effective tax collector is inflation.

Virginia’s long refusal to adjust any element of its income tax for slow but constant inflation means that each year, a slightly higher percentage of your growing income is taxed, and the rising costs of living shrink the value of the standard deduction and push more of your income into the top tax bracket.

In 1990 Virginia’s income tax looked like it does today – an $800 personal exemption, a $3,000 standard deduction for a single taxpayer, and income above $17,000 was taxed at the maximum rate of 5.75 percent.

Had the 1990 tax code also included a provision to adjust those amounts annually for inflation, today the personal exemption would be $1,578, the individual standard deduction $5,916 and the top tax rate would not kick in until $33,524.   The higher personal exemption and standard deduction combined would eliminate the tax bite on almost $9,000 income for a family of four – saving over $500.

Continue reading →

The House Finance Committee will hold its first meeting of the 2019 General Assembly Monday morning, finally starting public discussion of Virginia’s response to a major federal tax overhaul from 13 months ago that will…

No! Belay that!  All House bills dealing with how Virginia conforms to that federal change, and what other policy changes might follow, have been assigned to the House Rules Committee, chaired by Speaker Kirk Cox and meeting whenever the Speaker decides for it to meet.   The one bill on the issue assigned to Finance is likely to also be referred to Rules tomorrow.

Continue reading →

Are You In The Hugo Zone?

Delegate Tim Hugo (R-Centreville) is the point person for a state income tax proposal centered on less-than-full conformity with the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.  It only helps a narrow subset of Virginia taxpayers, those in The Hugo Zone.  We will now try to take you there.  (If you want to imagine Rod Serling’s voice in your head, feel free.)

Under straight conformity, as proposed by Governor Ralph Northam, a taxpayer taking the federal standard deduction would be stuck with the state standard, as well.  Under straight conformity, deductions for local taxes on either return would be capped at $10,000.  Hugo, standing Friday with several key House Republicans, announced a bill to put Virginia out of conformity on those two points.

Continue reading →