10-22-24: This Election Cycle Holds Major Taxable Consequences

by Bryan Perry

October 22, 2024

Heading into the November 5th election, there are a number of risks investors are carefully monitoring that could quickly alter the bullish mood of stock investors during a robust earnings season. (Analysts are projecting a 4.6% year-over-year increase in earnings, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of growth).

During this earnings season, the S&P sectors projected to be big winners are information technology, health care and communication services, while energy is expected to report the largest decline compared to a year ago. The best news is that upbeat earnings aren’t just a byproduct of cost savings or stock buybacks. The S&P is projected to deliver 4.8% year-over-year revenue growth for Q3, with 10 of the 11 market sectors showing positive sales growth, as the economy is enjoying broad sector participation.

That said, the market faces downward revisions and sector specific challenges for the current quarter, painting a more complex outlook for investors. What keeps coming up, within the analyst community, is market valuation and the lofty premium the S&P currently sports. The forward 12-month P/E ratio for the S&P 500 is 21.6, exceeding both the 5-year average (19.5) and the 10-year average (18.0), indicating that the market might be pricing-in rising future earnings expectations. However, that’s hard to dismiss, considering that the top-weighted S&P components are the high-growth mega-cap tech companies.

Among the outliers in everyone’s peripheral vision, is the potential for a widening regional war in the Middle East, a naval blockade of Taiwan exports by China and a sweep of the Senate, House, and the White House by the Democratic Party, which would set in motion passage of higher taxes: income taxes, corporate taxes, capital gains and dividend taxes, estate taxes, excise taxes, property taxes and sales taxes.

These higher taxes would be sold to voters as necessary to pay for exploding federal deficits to finance Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, assistance to low-income individuals and soaring interest on the federal debt, since “tax and spend” represents a core pillar of party policy. To be fair, the blue party’s tax focus is aimed at corporations, the super-wealthy and stock market investors as a source of funds, but it is safe to say that a Democratic Party sweep would likely alter investor sentiment.

The Impact of a Baseline Tax Increase Platform

The effect of raising the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21% would likely include slower growth and lower wage increases, according to the Tax Foundation’s latest update, released October 16, 2024:

“We estimate the proposed tax changes would reduce long-run GDP by 2.0 percent, the capital stock by 3.0 percent, wages by 1.2 percent, and employment by about 786,000 full-time equivalent jobs. We find the tax policies would raise top tax rates on corporate and individual income to among the highest in the developed world, slowing economic growth and reducing competitiveness.”

Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.

These estimates of lost GDP, wages, jobs, and capital could be worse. They do not include Kamala Harris’s “novel and highly uncertain, yet large, tax increases on high earners and multinational corporations, namely a new minimum tax on unrealized capital gains” nor the “global-minimum tax model.”

Major business provisions modeled in the above study:

Increase the corporate income tax-rate from 21 percent to 28 percent
Increase the corporate alternative minimum tax introduced in the Inflation-Reduction Act from 15 percent to 21 percent
Quadruple the stock buyback tax in the Inflation Reduction Act from 1 percent to 4 percent
Make permanent the excess business loss limitation for pass-through businesses
Further limit the deductibility of employee compensation under Section 162(m)
Increase the global intangible low-taxed income (GILTI) tax rate from 10.5 percent to 21 percent
Repeal the reduced tax rate on foreign-derived intangible income (FDII)

The implications of hiking the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% complicates U.S. competitiveness. The signing of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) by then-President Donald Trump on December 22, 2017, lowered corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, providing one of the most significant revisions in the U.S. tax system in decades. It targeted the offshoring of American businesses by removing the incentive for corporations to redomicile to jurisdictions outside the U.S.

Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is set to expire December 31, 2025, and if not extended, many of the tax changes will revert to their pre-2017 levels.  “It’s going to be the Super Bowl of tax law changes in less than 18 months,” said Mark Steber, chief tax information officer at tax preparer Jackson Hewitt. Changes will affect people differently, but Steber said everyone’s “tax rates will be higher. That’s inarguable.”

Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.

On the surface (chart, above), the percentage of tax revenues from corporations in the U.S. is stated to be low, around 6% of all federal tax revenue, which seems small by comparison when individual income taxes (federal, state, and local) were the primary source of tax revenue in 2021, at 42.1% of tax revenue.

The 6% figure is low because more than half of business income in the U.S. is reported on individual tax returns. Relative to other OECD countries, the U.S. approach to taxing business income boosts the share of tax revenue from individual income taxes in the U.S. and reduces the share of corporate tax revenue.

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) explains the difference of how corporations calculate their taxes:

“In the U.S., there are generally two forms of businesses, each facing a different tax regime. Traditional C corporations pay corporate income tax at the entity level and their payments show up in the corporate tax revenue statistics. In contrast, ‘pass-through’ businesses—S corporations, partnerships, and sole proprietorships—do not face the corporate income tax. Instead, their profits are immediately passed to their owners as business income each year and, typically, taxed as ordinary income. These owners’ tax remittances show up as individual income tax collections, not corporate income tax collections.”

The thought that an increase in the corporate tax rate only impacts large corporations can be misleading. While the corporate tax rate itself doesn’t directly affect pass-through entities, owners of these businesses may be impacted if the business has retained earnings. The higher corporate tax rate could also reduce the amount of profits available for distribution. This may help explain why the U.S. has smaller corporate tax collections relative to GDP than some other countries. In the words of economist Art Laffer, “Taxes have consequences,” which, by extension, means that “Elections can have major tax consequences.”