Before House Ways and Means Committee Chairman David Camp, R-Mich., could reveal on Wednesday his plan to overhaul the tax code, Senate Republicans nixed any chance of passage of tax reform this year.
Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is quoted as saying Tuesday: "I don't see how we can" advance tax reform this year.
Political strategists say Republicans are already taking issue with Camp's plan, since it hikes taxes on the rich and banks, eliminates the lower tax rate on carried interest and would get rid of popular tax breaks.
Brian Graff, executive director of the American Society of Pension Professionals and Actuaries, said in an early Wednesday statement that at first blush he supported Camp's plan. "This proposal is a serious attempt at threading the needle – raising revenue in the budget window while substantially maintaining the incentive to set up and maintain an employer-based (retirement) plan."
Graff said ASPPA believed Camp's proposal "accomplishes a fine balance and is preferable to the disincentives to coverage and savings rates created by capping or eliminating existing limits."
However, after further review, Graff released a statement Thursday stating his concern with Camp's double taxation of retirement plan contributions. "Chairman Camp's tax reform proposal would subject all retirement plan contributions to the 10 percent surtax. The result is double taxation of these contributions — totally ignoring the fact that these contributions are just tax–deferred, not a permanent exclusion, and will be subject to ordinary income tax when they are withdrawn after retirement."
Should this proposal become law, Graff said that a small business owner "could pay a 10 percent surtax on all contributions made to a qualified retirement plan today, then pay tax again at the full ordinary income tax rate when they retire." Penalizing small business owners for contributing to a plan, he continued, "is going to make them think twice about sponsoring a plan at all, and their employees could lose their workplace retirement plan. Double taxation is hardly what we hoped to see in any tax reform proposal." Graff added that ASPPA is also "very concerned about the freeze" on contribution limits until 2023. "The cost of living in retirement is not going to be frozen. On top of the double taxation, this is a real blow to employer-sponsored retirement plans, and to American workers' retirement security."
Camp said that his plan would not change how the tax code treats the money Americans have already saved. Going forward, it would maintain the 2014 contribution limits for individual retirement accounts and for defined contribution plans, like 401(k)s.
"Today, when saving for retirement, a taxpayer decides whether to put the money away for retirement after taxes and save tax-free (Roth accounts), or put the money away tax-free and then pay taxes when they withdraw the funds during retirement (traditional accounts)," Camp said.
For future contributions, Camp's plan allows up to $8,750 (half of the contribution limit) to be contributed either to a traditional or Roth account.
Robert Moore, president of Advisor and Institution Solutions for LPL Financial, and vice chairman of the Insured Retirement Institute, told ThinkAdvisor in a Wednesday interview from Capitol Hill that while he hadn't seen all of the details of Camp's plan, IRI and LPL are lobbying lawmakers to preserve the tax-deferred status of retirement plans. "Deferral is not avoidance; it's creating a set of incentives for enhanced savings."
This is just part of the message that he and other IRI executives were delivering Wednesday during their meeting with more than two dozen lawmakers.
Indeed, IRI President Cathy Weatherford noted that while Camp's discussion draft "will certainly reignite the conversation on tax policy in America, it will be important for policymakers to recognize the overlap between tax policy and retirement security."
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday, Camp said he was releasing a plan to create "a simpler, fairer tax code." The discussion draft states this will be achieved in three ways:
- Providing a significantly more generous standard deduction so that 95 percent of taxpayers will no longer be forced to itemize their individual tax deductions.
- Reducing the size of the federal income tax code by 25 percent.
- Tackling fraud, abuse and mismanagement at the IRS to protect hard-earned taxpayer dollars.
Camp's plan also reduces and collapses today's brackets into two brackets of 10 percent and 25 percent for virtually all taxable income. More than 99 percent of taxpayers face maximum rates of 25 percent or less.
The plan would also impose a 10 percent surtax on certain types of earned income over roughly $450,000 a year, hitting salaried professionals but not the super-rich, whose income often is derived primarily from interest and investments.
