Prepared Testimony for the Washington
House Finance Committee
February 16, 2018
Madam Chairwoman and Members of the Committee:
My name is Jared Walczak, and I’m a senior policy analyst with the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan taxA tax is a mandatory payment or charge collected by local, state, and national governments from individuals or businesses to cover the costs of general government services, goods, and activities. policy research organization.
Capital gains taxation has been a subject of perennial consideration here in Washington, and by now you have heard most of the arguments on both sides many times over. In my brief time, I simply want to highlight two points which remain relevant each time these measures are considered.
The first is the extreme volatility of capital gains realizations. In every other state where capital gains are taxed, they are but one part of a broader income tax, so the radical swings are absorbed, somewhat, into the broader revenue trends. Here, the intention is to create a stand-alone capital gains taxA capital gains tax is levied on the profit made from selling an asset and is often in addition to corporate income taxes, frequently resulting in double taxation. These taxes create a bias against saving, leading to a lower level of national income by encouraging present consumption over investment. to generate recurring revenue for key state priorities. But how do you handle the fluctuations?
During the Great Recession, the realization of capital gains slid 71 percent. They slipped 55 percent in 1987 and 46 percent in 2001. Now, very few revenue sources do well during a recessionA recession is a significant and sustained decline in the economy. Typically, a recession lasts longer than six months, but recovery from a recession can take a few years. —but traditional tax bases don’t have three-quarters of their value evaporate in a single year. Even in more typical years, outside of recessions, capital gains realizations are highly volatile.
The second issue is, of course, the legal hurdle. To avoid challenges to the constitutionality of an income tax, the capital gains tax under consideration is termed an excise tax. I would call your attention, however, to the fact that it in no way behaves like an excise taxAn excise tax is a tax imposed on a specific good or activity. Excise taxes are commonly levied on cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, soda, gasoline, insurance premiums, amusement activities, and betting, and typically make up a relatively small and volatile portion of state and local and, to a lesser extent, federal tax collections. . Not only are capital gains taxed as income in every state with an income tax, and by the federal government, but the proposal here is not to tax the transaction but rather the net—which is to say, the net income.
There’s a reason we often consider sales and excise taxes together: excise taxes are, at base, transaction taxes. Often they are ad valorem, on the entire cost of a transaction—essentially a special sales tax. Other times they follow a specified rate schedule, for instance a particular amount per pack of cigarettes, regardless of sales price What they never do is fall on a calculation of net income.
This tax isn’t on capital gains transactions, or on the privilege of buying and selling investment instruments. It is on the net of gains and losses over the course of a defined period. That is decidedly an income tax—on a narrow class of income, yes, but an income tax nonetheless.
Across the country, courts have historically cared about substance over form when it comes to taxation, and certain substance over name. Simply styling a tax on a class of income as an excise tax doesn’t change its fundamental character. A proper reverence for the state constitution, and the avoidance of costly litigation, argues against adopting a proscribed tax by calling it something else.