Not your corporate welfare.  Just ours.  Iowa Senate taxwriters have been eloquent in criticizing the corporate welfare famously doled out to fertilizer companies over the last year.  It turns out, though, that not all corporate welfare is bad, to them.  Just that proposed by the other party.  The Senate Ways and Means Committee advanced a set of its own welfare programs yesterday, including:

SF 238, which would provide a 30% tax credit (subsidy) “for persons who construct, install, and place in service an electric vehicle facility or a natural gas vehicle facility.”  So if you buy a Chevy Volt, Senate Ways and Means wants to pay 30% of the cost of installing special plug-ins.

SSB 1240, which “increases to $50 million from $45 million the amount of historic preservation and cultural and entertainment district tax credits.”  These are a cash cow for well-connected developers and rehabbers.

SF 205, which opens up an existing program to divert withheld employee taxes “to create economic incentives that can be directed towards business.”  The bill “removes the requirement that an employer…be located in an urban renewal area.”  In other words, it makes it just another “incentive” slush fund to pay people to be our friends.

So it’s not a principled opposition to business subsidies.  They just want different ones.

Far better to get the state out of the subsidy business and make the tax system good for everyone — not just those with the pull and the consultants to game the system.  Far better to enact The Tax Update’s Quick and Dirty Iowa Tax Reform Plan.

Related:  New Jersey corporate tax breaks surge, but economy lags: study

The courts haven’t been kind to the IRS preparer regulation power grab, but some preparers welcome our new preparer regulation overlords.  An example is Three reasons why the IRS will persist in its mission to regulate tax return preparers (Jim Buttonow)

The article takes for granted that the costs the regulations will impose will exceed the benefits:

Knowledgeable  tax return preparers—who are reminded each year through education requirements to  conduct effective due diligence on small businesses—can have a much greater  impact on compliance than IRS auditors.

That makes an unwarranted assumption: that the IRS can create “knowledgeable tax return preparers.”  It can’t.  It can make people fill out paperwork, go through the motions of paying for CPE, and take meaningless open book literacy competency tests, but it can’t make anybody competent.

The IRS has limited resources.  Semi-literate South Florida grifters are stealing billions through fraudulent refunds.  Yet the IRS seems to think its problem is honest preparers.

Smoke ‘em if you can afford ‘em. Monday Map: State Cigarette Tax Rates, 2013 (Nick Kasprak, Tax Policy Blog).

Ben Harris, Hiking Dividend Taxes to Pay for a Corporate Rate Cut (TaxVox):

Finland will lower the corporate rate to 20 percent in 2014, down from the current rate of 24.5 percent (and 26.0 percent in 2011)…

Finland plans to pay for part of the rate cut by boosting the effective investor tax rate on dividends paid by companies listed on the Finnish stock exchange.

Why not instead create a full dividends-paid deduction.  It would eliminate the need for a rate preference for dividend inocme while eliminating the destructive double-tax on corproate earnings.

Russ Fox,  Bozo Tax Tip #9: Foreign Trusts

Paul Neiffer,  The Two Week Check List

Missouri Tax Guy,  Residential Energy Tax Credits 2012

William Perez,  Tips for SEP-IRA Contributions

Kay Bell, Tax Carnival #115: Final filing crunch 2013

Jeremy Scott, Tim Johnson, Kristi Noem, and the Importance of Moderates to Tax Reform (Tax.com)

The Myth of Crumbling Highways (David Hartgen).  A useful counterpoint to the construction interests lobbying for higher gas taxes.

Peter Reilly, Taxpayer Beats Idaho On Domicile But Loses On Community Property

Going Concern had fun yesterday for April Fools day.  This one puzzled me, though: Twilight Remake to Feature Auditors Instead of Vampires.  Isn’t that like saying the Daytona 500 will feature automobiles instead of cars?