Congressional Democrats want to use the tax code to penalize large corporate severance packages. But this should be a matter for stockholders to decide, not headline-seeking politicians. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, explains that the middle class often feels the brunt of tax schemes designed to punish the so-called rich:
One of the ways the Senate bill does this is to place a cap on the amount of “deferred compensation” that a company can award its top executives in a given year. The cap is equal to $1 million or the executive’s average salary for the previous five years, whichever is lower. But rather than simply tax any deferred compensation above that threshold as income, it imposes an additional 20% penalty tax on deferred comp above the limit. The Joint Committee on Taxation predicts this provision will bring in $800 million over the next decade. We’ll go out on a limb and predict it brings in an amount closer to $0.
Senate leaders describe this cap on deferred compensation as closing a loophole in the 1993 law that barred companies from deducting from their taxes more than $1 million of salary paid to their CEO and other top execs. Never mind that employee salaries have always been a deductible business expense. This was the last time Democrats ran Congress, and thus the last time they could sock it to the successful.
That 1993 law has itself become a classic example of unintended consequences. The biggest “loophole” in that law was an exemption carved out for performance-based compensation, which was meant to alleviate concerns about Congress setting pay rates in the private sector. Back then, even tub-thumping Senator Carl Levin said “I don’t support the government setting CEO pay in the tax code.” Which he and his mates proceeded to do anyway. And businesses promptly responded by shifting CEO pay away from salary and toward stock options and bonuses to circumvent the cap.
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[T]his time, a much larger pool of people than CEOs could be hit by the new deferred comp cap. People who make a lot less than $1 million have occasion to defer some of their salary, and at many companies even middle managers can do so. If this bill becomes law, those non-millionaires potentially face a 55% tax rate on the income they might otherwise have tried to defer. The tax code is riddled with provisions, such as the Alternative Minimum Tax, the estate tax and any number of phaseouts and caps, that were sold politically as targeting only the “super-rich” but now capture taxpayers of far more modest means.
