July 12, 2022

Public-Sector Pensions Weathered Pandemic

The economic turmoil in the early months of the pandemic – a plunging stock market and soaring unemployment – posed a real threat to state and local government pension funds and the workers who rely on them.

One group was particularly vulnerable: public-sector workers who aren’t covered by Social Security and lack the backstop of the federal government if their employer pension plans get into trouble.

The Center for Retirement Research has some good news for these 5 million noncovered workers living in 20 states. Their pension plans got through the first two years of the pandemic unscathed.

In dollar terms, government contributions to these defined benefit pension plans actually increased during COVID. That and a roaring stock market in 2021 significantly improved their financial condition. Of course, this sunny report is clouded by what is happening to the stock market now – it has reversed course and dropped 20 percent this year.

But the researchers’ assessment is that COVID was not the financial disaster many had feared for the public-sector workers who aren’t covered by Social Security.

The 59 noncovered plans in the study vary in size from small local pension plans like the Pittsburgh Police Relief and Pension Fund to the nation’s largest state plan, the California Public Employees Retirement System.

Congress’ financial support during COVID played an important role in stabilizing state and local governments’ finances. They received hundreds of billions in pandemic relief from the CARES Act in March 2020 and, a year later, the American Rescue Plan. The federal relief checks to families and businesses also added billions to state and local tax bases. Importantly, tax revenues snapped back after a brief drop in 2020, because high-income workers, who pay more in taxes, didn’t suffer the dramatic layoffs experienced by low-income workers.

The federal support provided the fiscal breathing room for governments to make their pension contributions on schedule. In fact, some of the states with the most poorly funded plans – namely New Jersey and Connecticut – took advantage of the fiscal windfall to make historically large contributions in 2022. …Learn More

November 16, 2021

Lifting SALT Deduction Would Help the Rich

Manhattan residents who itemize their federal tax returns pay an average $102,000 in state and local taxes – more than anywhere else. The second highest tax tabs, nearly $50,000, are in Marin County, the home of musicians and movie stars across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

Other enclaves with large bills for property, sales, and income taxes include Falls Church, Virginia, a high-income community outside Washington, D.C., and Teton County, Wyoming, where the super-wealthy buy property on the open range surrounding Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park.

In 2017, Congress put a $10,000 cap on the amount of state and local taxes – or SALT – that all homeowners could deduct on their federal income tax filings. The proposed reconciliation bill being hashed out in Congress might increase or remove that cap.

The Brookings Institution argued that lifting the cap would “massively favor the rich” at a time U.S. inequality is already at historic levels. There is no shortage of evidence to back that up.

High-income Americans on both coasts and in major cities like Chicago and Dallas would save thousands of dollars from lifting the cap on SALT deductions. In Santa Clara County, home to Silicon Valley, for example, the average high-income taxpayer who itemized reported that they paid nearly $47,000 in state and local taxes in 2018, according to the bipartisan Tax Foundation’s analysis of IRS data.

But due to the current cap, the IRS permitted county residents to deduct only about $9,000 for their SALT taxes. (The number is slightly below the $10,000 cap because some itemizers take smaller deductions if, for example, they are renters and don’t pay property taxes.)

One proposal gaining currency in the House would increase the cap on deductions from $10,000 to $80,000, as an alternative to eliminating it entirely. Garrett Watson, author of the Tax Foundation report, said that either raising the cap or another idea – limiting the cap to the nation’s top earners – would still mainly benefit the top 5 percent.

But, he added, preserving some type of cap, even if it’s more generous, “will be less regressive than eliminating it altogether, because the folks at the very top – the multimillionaires and billionaires – would still face that curtailed SALT deduction.”

The Tax Policy Center, an affiliate of the Urban Institute and Brookings, estimates that repealing the cap on SALT deductions would increase after-tax income for households earning more than $100,000 by between 1 percent and 2 percent. Families with lower earnings would be unaffected. …Learn More