Below is the text of an email I received from Republicans Overseas on their efforts I am incredibly pleased to see their move to tie capital gains with inflation — a move I first recall seeing proposed by Rudy Guiliani in his 2008 presidential bid.
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It’s a new year, and we have new opportunities to work towards the implementation of Territorial Taxation for Individuals.
TERRITORIAL TAXATION FOR INDIVIDUALS
We initially expected that a tax reconciliation bill would be submitted in April 2018 to fix any issues with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that was passed at the end of 2017. However, it now appears that the IRS will not make any recommendations for ‘fixes’ until the end of 2018. Republicans Overseas has champions in both the House and Senate who are willing to sponsor clean TTFI bills.
However, we will need your support to petition the Speaker of the House, Representative Paul Ryan, and the Senate Majority Leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, to bring these bills to a vote. We will run a petition campaign from February 12 – March 25, 2018, seeking to gain 10,000 signatures asking for a vote on TTFI.
Please sign this petition at www.ttfi.info and ask 10 of your American friends to do so, as well. It doesn’t matter if they live overseas or stateside: we need to show strong support for these bills. The petition will run from February 13 through March 13, 2018.
EXCISE TAX ON FOREIGN EARNINGS
The 15.5% excise tax is one of the unintended consequences of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. While it will ease the repatriation of billions of dollars for large multinationals, the same excise tax applied to small businesses owned by overseas Americans could result in bankruptcy. In our TTFI petition, we also request that the House and Senate enact legislation to exempt overseas Americans who own small businesses from the excise tax. Your signature will help to protect your fellow overseas Americans. We want this fix to be part of the IRS fixes to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that will go through a reconciliation process by the end of this year.
CAPITAL GAINS TAX LINKED TO INFLATION
Grover Norquist’s organization, Americans for Tax Reform (‘ATR’), has written a letter to Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin asking him to ‘modify the calculation of capital gains taxes to include an inflation adjustment.’ The justification for this is that an additional tax cut could be offered to American citizens by adding inflation adjustment to capital gains calculations.
For example, if you make an investment of $1000 in 2000 and sell that investment for $2000 in 2017, the gain of $1000 will be taxed at the top rate of 23.8%. However, if the purchase price was adjusted to reflect inflation, the adjusted purchase price would be $1421 in 2017 dollars. The ‘true gain’ would be $579. Unadjusted, the tax bill would be $238. Adjusted for inflation, the tax bill would be $138. This adjustment could be made by the Treasury department without requiring a bill in Congress and without needing any sort of scoring.
Although this is not TTFI, the benefits of such an action should be granted to overseas Americans as well as those living stateside. This is our opportunity to show Congress that the right way to reform tax codes is to make sure that corporations as well as stateside and overseas American individuals should all benefit equally from tax reform.
Please support linking capital gains taxation to inflation by signing this petition. This petition will run from February 13 through March 13.
FATCA REPEAL
Republicans Overseas continues to push for FATCA Repeal. Unfortunately, the Senate was unable to vote on Senator Paul’s FATCA repeal amendment during the Senate’s discussion of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In fact, only two out of more than a hundred amendments were voted on. FATCA is a part of the HIRE Act and repealing part of an existing bill outside of a budget reconciliation will require 60 votes in the Senate. A legislative repeal seems unlikely at this point.
However, Chairman Mark Meadows and Senator Rand Paul did write a letter to Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin, asking his department to review FATCA as an onerous regulation with little benefit. He has agreed to review FATCA along with the unconstitutional IGAs (inter-governmental agreements) that were entered into without being voted on by Congress. Additionally, Republicans Overseas continues to push our lawsuit on the unconstitutionality of FATCA.
We have appealed the lower court’s ruling on standing to the Supreme Court, and are waiting for the SCOTUS to decide whether or not to hear our case.
Republicans Overseas continues to fight for the implementation of Territorial Taxation for Individuals and for the repeal of FATCA. Your signature matters! The last petition delivered by Republicans Overseas to Chairman Brady resulted in our TTFI proposal getting put forward to the Joint Committee on Taxation for scoring. Without those 3000 signatures, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee would not have taken that action.
Now, we need the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader to allow bills on TTFI to be brought to their respective chambers for a vote. We need to demonstrate that Americans care about TTFI, so that our elected representatives will care, too.
Please sign the petitions and ask your American friends to do the same! Sign the TTFI petition here and the Capital Gains Petition here.
Thank you!
Sincerely, Michael DeSombre
Worldwide President Republicans Overseas
