Treasury Puts Out a Really Crappy Report on Impact of Recovery Act Tax Provisions.

On Sept. 4th the Treasury Department put out a report HERE that attempts to showcase the impact of Recovery Act tax provisions that total more than $66 Billion.

This was a golden opportunity and quite frankly the crappy way the report was put together is a real disservice to this Administration. As is way too often the case in Treasury and Recovery Act reporting, the focus is on national numbers and the numbers for state and local areas are either not included at all or are included in ways that are decidedly NOT helpful.

Overall Problems:

1. Several of the state tables included cannot even be copied into spreadsheets because of formatting problems.
2. There is NO effort made to provide totals for each state for all the various tax programs.
3. Most, if not ALL tables, do NOT even include a US total.
4. No jobs impact information is included.
   
5. None of the data has yet appeared on the Recovery.gov website and I'm not sure it will. As of Labor Day, Recovery.gov shows $4,000 paid out by Treasury in Oregon so far......
   

First Time Home buyer Credit Problems

1. The table (pages 18-19) shows a state listing of first time home buyer families and the $ outlays for them. For Oregon the table shows that there are 3,565 households receiving estimated outlays of $1,771,887, which would be $497 per household. This LIKELY means that these are the number of families who will receive a refundable tax credit (credit exceeds their federal tax liability) and does NOT include the total number of families receiving the credit including
   those who have tax liabilities that exceed the credit amount they will receive. I say LIKELY because Treasury doesn't provide that explanation, but we know that the credit is $8,000 not $500 so this is the only explanation that seems logical to me.
2. The total $$ for families receiving a refundable credit is NOT shown in the state table, however the total outlay show in the summary of $153 million is WAY below the multi BILLION total cost of the first time home buyer credit. ($153 million is likely only the cost of the refundable part of the credit). Treating the home buyer tax credit in this way makes no sense to me as the totals for credits for other programs do NOT appear to be limited to only the refundable costs of these tax credit programs nor does it seem likely that refundable credits total to the $66 Billion referenced in the Treasury press release.