How Hillary Clinton would (and wouldn’t) raise taxes on business

The most contentious issue during the recent Yahoo Finance Trump-Clinton economic debate was Hillary Clinton’s plan for “business tax reform.” Those are the words used on her website to describe how she’ll come up with $275 billion to spend rebuilding infrastructure and creating jobs.

So what is “business tax reform?” During the Yahoo Finance debate, Clinton economic adviser Roger Altman insisted the additional revenue Clinton seeks to raise is not a tax on businesses. “No, she hasn’t proposed to raise taxes on business,” Altman says in the video above.

“It’s on her website,” argues Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro.

“No, it is not on her website,” Altman answers.

“It’s on her website,” an incredulous Navarro repeats.

Enough of this tedium. Yahoo Financed promised to fact-check this dispute, and give viewers a straight answer. So here’s what the two advisers are arguing about.

Clinton has proposed no changes in the corporate tax code, which is curious, because this is one improvement to the tax code that might actually be politically possible. In the Yahoo Finance debate, Altman suggested that Clinton does have a corporate tax reform plan she hopes to unveil after the campaign, if she wins. It would probably entail a lower top tax rate, fewer loopholes and possibly a “repatriation plan” to bring overseas profits home at a one-time discounted tax rate. So Clinton has not proposed a hike in the corporate tax rate.

But the majority of US businesses aren’t subject to the corporate tax rate in the first place. Most American businesses—from one-person operations to large, privately held partnerships—are so-called pass-through entities whose owners pay tax at individual rates. Changes in tax law over the years have led to a surge in the portion of pass-through businesses, which now account for more than half of all business income. The biggest, publicly owned companies—such as those in the S&P 500 index–are usually C corporations subject to the corporate tax rate, but most private businesses are not.

Clinton’s plan would raise taxes on many of these businesses, because she’d raise taxes on wealthy individual filers. In general, Clinton’s plan calls for tax hikes on people earning $1 million or more, as Altman explains in the video above. She’d also raise the capital-gains tax rate on some investment profits, depending on how long the asset producing the gain is held. While couched as a hike in tax rates for wealthy individuals, there would also be de facto tax hikes on many pass-through businesses.

A 2015 research paper by five Treasury Department tax experts and three independent economists found that: “The rise of pass-throughs accounts for much of the rise in income inequality over the last three decades.” The owners of such firms face nominal tax rates as high as 50%, including state and local taxes. But a wide variety of deductions and other tax breaks helps many business owners slash their actual tax bill to much lower rates.

With those offsets—all entirely legal—taken into account, pass-throughs paid an “effective” tax rate ranging from 13.6% to 24.9%, depending on how the business was structured and how much of its profits came from capital gains, typically taxed at lower rates than normal labor income. For big C corporations subject to the corporate tax rate, the average effective tax paid was 31.6% of net income. The significant gap explains why just about any business would want to be taxed as a pass-through, if possible.

So when Clinton or her advisers talk about “business tax reform,” they are invariably referring to tax hikes that would affect a lot of businesses. Whether those businesses and the individuals profiting from them can afford such a tax hike is a separate question, one that voters will get to answer at the polls on Nov. 8.

Rick Newman is the author of four books, including Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.