According to an investigation by The Knoxville News Sentinel, wealthy individuals — including corporate CEOs and country music stars — are taking advantage of a loophole in Tennessee law to claims huge tax breaks on their property. This tax provision is meant to help farmers, but instead is helping members of the 1 percent save tens of thousands of dollars on their property taxes every year:

An investigation by The Knoxville News Sentinel and The Commercial Appeal found…an impressive roster of wealthy Tennesseans who make their millions elsewhere but use the farmland protection law to escape much of their local property tax bills — from Fortune 500 executives to country music stars. [...]

In Williamson County, the local assessor has enrolled well-known country music stars such as Billy Ray Cyrus, and Naomi and Wynonna Judd in the program, yet public records reveal little about those operations.

Cyrus, for example, receives a $29,000-a-year tax break on a 467-acre, $6.5 million spread with a tree-topped hill near Thompson Station, Tenn., where the “Achy Breaky Heart” star owns a 7,850-square-foot home. Williamson County records show Cyrus, who’s also lived at times in Los Angeles, holds separate farming greenbelts on six of seven parcels that comprise the 467-acre tract. By law, applications for greenbelt are supposed to be filed with the local Register of Deeds. Yet a check of records there revealed applications for just two of the six farming greenbelts, both from 1994, when the singer disclosed that he intended to raise corn, horses and cattle.

Sadly, this is not a phenomenon confined to the Volunteer State. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) took advantage of lax Florida tax laws and some cows to lower his property tax bill. Tom Cruise pulled the same trick with sheep in Colorado, as did Bon Jovi with beehives in New Jersey. Some corporate campuses even qualify as “farms” because they let a few cows graze on the land.

States can ill-afford to let revenue slip away, as they’re still combating the effects of the Great Recession. Eliminating a loophole that allows the wealthiest citizens to avoid paying property taxes seems like a no-brainer. (HT: Citizens for Tax Justice)

CONWAY, New Hampshire — Less than a year after attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new stimulus funded infrastructure project in New Hampshire, Rep. Frank Guinta (R-NH) derided the Recovery Act, telling constituents at a debate to ask “if that stimulus helped them.”

The freshman congressman attended and spoke at a dedication of a new airport access road in Manchester last November, despite campaigning against the recovery package in his 2010 congressional campaign. Watch the video here.

However, when Guinta was asked at a debate Thursday how he could oppose the stimulus when it saved the country from a repeat of the Great Depression, he was flippant: “Ask our small business owners right here in the Conway area if the stimulus bill has provided more predictability for them or if it has been more challenging for them”:

MODERATOR: Wouldn’t we have been gambling with a great collapse as occurred during the 30s if we had not passed the stimulus bill?

GUINTA: The 30s and this economy are very, very different, number one. [...] For 43 consecutive months, we have had unemployment in this country over 8 percent. Try talking to somebody in the middle class who’s been looking for a job for more than 6 months, who’s struggling to pay their bills, and ask them if that stimulus helped them. Ask our small business owners right here in the Conway area if the stimulus bill has provided more predictability for them or if it has been more challenging for them.

Watch it:

The Conway area alone received more than $2.2 million in the stimulus, with money going to projects ranging from construction and infrastructure to local school districts. New Hampshire as a whole received more than $986 million to fund more than 1,400 projects.

Guinta has a history of stimulus hypocrisy, decrying the recovery package while at the same time attending ribbon-cutting ceremonies. He was even called a “grandstander” by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) after he complained as mayor of Manchester that stimulus funds weren’t arriving quickly enough.

Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Throughout the campaign, Mitt Romney has refused to give details when asked how he plans to pay for his nearly $4.8 trillion in tax cuts. In Tuesday night’s debate, audience member Mary Follano asked Romney how his plan could affect her personal taxes. She specifically asked how his plan would affect tax benefits like education credits, which she said are “important to me because I have children in college.”

Romney didn’t answer her question, offering only a vague proposal on limiting certain deductions that wouldn’t come close to paying for his total tax plan. But on Thursday, to bolster its claims that a “Romney-style tax plan” could be made to add up, the Romney campaign pointed to a tax plan presented in a 2006 report from Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). As ThinkProgress reported earlier, the tax plan Romney is holding up as a model would eliminate nearly all middle-class tax breaks:

Under the proposal, all personal exemptions, itemized deductions, personal credits except for the earned income credit, and all above-the-line adjustments to income except for retirement savings deductions and the deduction for self employment taxes would be repealed. The largest categories of deductions repealed are present-law deductions for home mortgage interest expenses, State and local taxes, and charitable contributions. In addition, the exclusions for certain employee fringe benefits, such as employer contributions for health and life insurance, would be repealed. The standard deduction would remain.

As the study found, such a plan would cause a “redistribution of individual income tax liability from high wage earners to low wage earners.” In other words, according to former congressional tax counsel John Buckley, it “would reduce taxes on high income individuals and finance that tax reduction by increasing taxes on everyone else.”

Let’s look at how such a plan could affect middle-class taxpayers in finer detail. Consider Ms. Follano — the woman who asked Romney for specific answers on his tax plan. We don’t know enough about Follano to calculate her taxes with precision, but we can use what we do know about her to gauge the potential impact of the “Romney-style tax plan” on someone in her shoes.

Read more

Through two presidential debates and one vice-presidential debate, the candidates have faced exactly zero questions about the U.S. housing market, despite the fact that housing has been a weight on the economic recovery. As ThinkProgress noted before the debates, there are several pertinent questions that both candidates should be asked about housing policy.

But the only media figure who seems interested in talking about this subject is The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, who last night asked President Obama about the underwhelming Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), which has fallen far short of its goals:

OBAMA: On housing, right now we could make sure that families whose homes are underwater, where they owe more than their house is worth, if they refinance, typically they’d get $3,000 bucks in their pockets a year. That’s $3,000 they’re spending or $3,000 that they’re putting back into equity in their home. The housing market would helped, employment would be helped. Even Governor Romney’s own adviser says this is a good idea, and yet Governor Romney opposes it.

STEWART: But don’t you have the HAMP program? Wasn’t $50 billion set aside for HAMP and only $5.5 billion of it has been used?

OBAMA: Actually, what’s happened is we’ve got 5 million homes that we’ve seen foreclosure prevented, we’ve got a settlement with the banks that provides another $25 billion to help the housing market.

Watch it (at 7:15):

HAMP was supposed to help three to four million homeowners, but has so far resulted in just 825,000 permanent mortgage modifications. One million borrowers, meanwhile, have started the program but been booted out before getting their mortgage permanently modified. Stewart is correct that just a fraction of the money dedicated to HAMP has been spent.

President Obama’s Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), under acting director Edward DeMarco, has also prevented homeowners from receiving more help. States, meanwhile, have been siphoning off funds from the $25 billion foreclosure fraud settlement and using them for non-housing related purposes.

Romney, meanwhile, has released a housing plan that has no details about the sort of policies he would pursue. The one time Romney addressed housing during the debates, he gave a bizarre diatribe about a regulation defining so-called “qualified mortgages.”

It surely says something about the media landscape and the focus of the debates that it took a comedian to raise this important issue with one of the candidates. (HT: David Dayen)

Republican Linda McMahon, the former professional wrestling executive who is taking her second shot at winning a Connecticut Senate seat, won’t specify how she would reform Social Security because the media will “bash” the plans, she said after a debate with her opponent, Democratic Rep. Chris Murphy.

At a tea party gathering in April, McMahon said programs like Social Security should have “sunset provisions” that require Congressional action to continue them once they expire, a plan that would constantly put the long-term future of Social Security at risk. She blamed the media for distorting those comments, and now she won’t reveal specifics about how she would change America’s most popular entitlement program until after the election, in order to avoid criticism, CT News Junkie reports:

“I’ve not talked about specifics when I’ve been on the campaign trail because they get demagogued and you have no opportunity at all when you go in and put the issues on the table to discuss them,” McMahon said, adding that it’s necessary to reform the program and there are many ways to do it. [...]

After the debate, McMahon clarified to reporters that it is mostly they, and not her opponent, whom she considers responsible for “demagoguing” ideas for Social Security.

“Thanks to all of you folks in the media, you’re the ones who primarily do it and bash any of the suggestions that might be made to improve the Social Security, Medicare,” she said.

During the 2010 election, McMahon’s first attempt to win election to the Senate, she also declined to offer policy specifics for programs like Social Security until after the election. “Social Security is going to go bankrupt,” she said then. “Clearly, we have to strengthen that…I just don’t believe that the campaign trail is the right place to talk about that.“

The media might not be McMahon’s biggest critic, though. As ThinkProgress has noted, media outlets and debate moderators have been eager to jump on the same myth McMahon and other Republicans who want to reform Social Security use — that the program is quickly headed toward bankruptcy. In fact, the program is financially healthy and guaranteed for the next 25 years — far longer than other basic programs that don’t receive the same scrutiny — and small changes to the payroll tax could ensure its health for another 75 years without changing its benefit structure.

Rather, McMahon’s largest critics would likely be the people she’s trying to represent, since Americans overwhelmingly oppose cutting Social Security benefits.

A study by the Congressional Research Service has determined that federal programs to assist low-income Americans — welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, Pell Grants, and so on — grew from a total of $563 billion in 2008 to $746 billion in 2011, according to a report today from The Hill. This increase of 33 percent so alarmed Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) that he fired off a statement yesterday calling for a wholesale retooling of the American social safety net:

These astounding figures demonstrate that United States spends more on federal welfare than any other program in the federal budget. It is time to restore—not retreat from—the moral principles of the 1996 welfare reform. Such reforms, combined with measures to promote growth, will help both the recipient and the Treasury. [...]

No longer should we measure compassion by how much money the government spends but by how many people we help to rise out of poverty. Welfare assistance should be seen as temporary whenever possible, and the goal must be to help more of our fellow citizens attain gainful employment and financial independence. This is about more than rescuing our finances. It’s about creating a more optimistic future for millions of struggling Americans.

Sessions’ complaint here is not simply wrong. It’s totally bizarre. The CRS report, which Sen. Sessions and other minority members of the Senate Budget Committee requested, makes clear that the bulk of the growth occurred between 2008 and 2009 due to the stimulus — by definition, a temporary measure. Sessions also makes no mention of the 2008 economic collapse, even though caseloads for programs such as Medicaid and food stamps naturally rise in an economic downturn as more Americans lose jobs and incomes and thus need greater help.

Medicaid spending will probably continue to increase because the growth of health care costs outpaces growth in the overall economy. But that problem is unique to Medicare and Medicaid, and long pre-dates the recession or the Obama administration. Other low-income programs such as food stamps are already anticipated to return to their historic trends as a share of the economy, once the effects of the recession and the stimulus wane.

By “the moral principles of the 1996 welfare reform” Sessions most likely means the budget engineered by vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan and passed by House Republicans, which block grants most low-income programs in the same way the 1996 reform did with welfare. Those block grants act as a smoke screen to hide massive cuts that slash Medicaid by a third in ten years — kicking 14 to 27 million people off the program — while driving spending on other low-income support programs down to their lowest levels in half a century. Beyond the ten year window, those cuts go even deeper. (There’s also a strong case that welfare reform made things worse for struggling families on its own terms.)

The official poverty rate currently stands at over 15 percent, a high it’s only touched twice since the 1960s. For children it’s almost 22 percent. Alternative poverty measures meant to disentangle income and assistance programs show that food stamps alone kept more than four million people above the poverty line in 2010, while reducing poverty’s severity for millions more. Programs to help low-income Americans quite naturally ramp up in times of economic hardship. That’s what they’re supposed to do.

Anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and author of a radical anti-tax pledge that hundreds of Republican lawmakers have signed, was again the subject of a heated exchange at a Senate debate Thursday night, when Wisconsin GOP Senate candidate Tommy Thompson denied that his support for the Norquist pledge means he can’t support tax increases on the wealthy.

Thompson’s Democratic opponent, Rep. Tammy Baldwin, challenged Thompson for signing the pledge during the debate. Thompson called Baldwin’s claim that the pledge opposes tax increases on the wealthy “a plain falsehood,” and said that Baldwin had “misstated” the pledge in her description:

BALDWIN: Too many members of Congress, and my opponent is included in this, have taken a pledge to a Washington DC lobbyist by the name of Grover Norquist whereby they’ve sworn that they will not ever ask those with the most privilege to do more, to do their fair share –

THOMPSON: That’s just, that’s just plain falsehood.

BALDWIN: You signed the Grover Norquist pledge.

THOMPSON: That’s just a falsehood. You just misstated it.

BALDWIN: You signed the Grover Norquist pledge.

THOMPSON: And you signed the progressive tax bill.

Watch it:

Thompson has indeed signed the pledge, according to Americans for Tax Reform’s web site, and it is hardly a falsehood that Norquist’s pledge prohibits raising taxes on the wealthy. The pledge states clearly that its signers should “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rate for individuals and business,” and that “any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits” should also be opposed unless they are matched by further reductions in tax rates. Norquist has been clear that pledge-signers should oppose tax increases for anyone, the wealthy included.

Thompson isn’t the first Republican to get challenged on the pledge during Senate debates. Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake (R), a candidate for his state’s open Senate seat, promised not to sign the Norquist pledge during his debate, even though he has already signed it.

Mitt Romney has been desperately trying to refute a study by the Tax Policy Center showing that he can’t mathematically achieve his goals of reducing income tax rates while shielding the middle class from a tax increase and not adding to the deficit. If Romney is committed to his rate reduction and deficit neutrality, he would have to raise middle class taxes by $2,000, even under the most generous assumptions.

Romney has been pointing to “six studies” that he claims show that his tax plan work. However, those “studies” (which are mostly blog posts and op-eds) show no such thing.

So now the Romney campaign is touting a 2006 study from the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation that he claims vindicates his approach, telling Roll Call the study shows “how a ‘Romney-style tax plan’ could bolster growth.” According to the study, tax reform that eliminates deductions and loopholes and reduces income tax rates will slightly increase economic growth over a decade. But the study assumes that nearly all middle class tax breaks — including those for children, mortgages, and employer contributions for health care — are repealed in their entirety:

Under the proposal, all personal exemptions, itemized deductions, personal credits except for the earned income credit, and all above-the-line adjustments to income except for retirement savings deductions and the deduction for self employment taxes would be repealed. The largest categories of deductions repealed are present-law deductions for home mortgage interest expenses, State and local taxes, and charitable contributions. In addition, the exclusions for certain employee fringe benefits, such as employer contributions for health and life insurance, would be repealed. The standard deduction would remain.

The study also found that such a plan would result in the “redistribution” of income tax liability from high-income earners to the middle class. And the promised job growth is only between 1 and 2 percent over ten years (one to two million jobs), while Romney promises that his tax plan will create seven million jobs over four years.

Romney’s claims about job creation under his tax plan are almost entirely fabricated. An economic adviser for both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations said this week that Romney’s tax plan won’t create jobs.